2-D Flapping Mechanisms

The mechanism consists of 2 servo motors. One of which is used for the heaving motion, and the other smaller servo motor is used for the twisting motion of the wing. The motors are linked to a PC and controlled by a program running on Real Time Labview.  Prior to running the experiments, the pulse train necessary to perform the required heaving motion is pre-calculated and sent to the servo motor using another Labview program. The wing motion is synchronized with a PIV system that captures the flow field around the wing. The PIV setup consists of a Nd-YAG pulsed laser as the illumination source and one megapixel (30Hz) digital CCD camera to capture the image data. The complete system is installed adjacent to a 40cm x 40cm re-circulating water tunnel.