Theoretical and experimental study of a piezoelectric flapping wing rotor for micro aerial vehicle

In this paper, investigation was made into the design, theoretical study, numerical modelling and experiment of a novel flapping wing rotor for micro aerial vehicles (MAV). Attention was firstly focused on the design of a simple, reliable and lightweight configuration of the flapping wing structure and the rotor. The design is to meet the challenging demand for high mechanical and power efficiency and vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) capability. To demonstrate the feasibility and effectiveness of the innovative design, a piezoelectric actuated flapping wing rotor model was manufactured and tested. Effort was also made to evaluate the design and analyze the dynamic behavior of the model by using finite element (FE) method. The unsteady aerodynamic force was modeled by theoretical method and CFD numerical simulation. To validate the theoretical and numerical analysis, experiment of the test model was carried out. In the experiment, the total force produced by the flapping wing rotor including the aerodynamic and inertia forces has been measured through a data process approach. The comparison shows a very good agreement between the experimental and analysis results. Improvement of the design can be made by using the methods.