The first insects took to the air more than 300 million years ago (i.e., according to paleontologists), long before the first bird-like creatures, the pterosaurs (flying dinosaurs), appeared on the scene some 100 million years later. Evolution has endowed insects with a mastery of air unmatched by any other groups of living beings.

As a step towards gaining understanding the intricacies of insect flight, an experimental research project is recently conducted in the ME department. The objective of this project is to establish essential engineering data and to gain basic understanding on the complex fluids dynamics of flapping flight. For this purpose, a 3-D flapping mechanism and a 2-D oscillating mechanism have been fabricated to allow aerodynamic force measurements on a pair of 3-D flapping wings and PIV measurements on the unsteady flow around a 2-D hovering wing. The experimental models are able to reproduce, via computer control, the complex wing motions of insects.

Besides answering to the idle curiosity in some of us (what some might call the science), there is also a technological dimension to the problem; that of re-creating in the longer-term the mechanical insect flyers, just as humans had first created the planes in emulation of the birds. It could be the next generation of toys for some and spyware for others.

Assoc. Prof. Yeo Khoon Seng

Henry Yohan Septiady