Alexander Gehrke

Wing twist and folding work in synergy to propel flapping wing animals and robots

We designed and built a three degrees-of-freedom (DOF) flapping wing robot, Flapperoo, to study the aerodynamic benefits of wing folding and twisting. Forces and moments of this physical model are measured in wind tunnel experiments over a Strouhal number range of St = 0.2–0.4 - typical for animal f