Abstract: Aims: The goal of this work is to develop artificial flexible wings with controllable aerodynamic and vibroacoustic characteristics that can be manufactured at a fast rate by additive manufacturing technologies, e.g. fused deposition modeling (FDM) or selective laser sintering (SLS), from widely available polymer materials.

Methods: The proposed wing model is inspired by the structure and shape of a natural dragonfly wing scaled up in sizes to satisfy manufacturing constraints. To enable controllable dynamics, the complex natural vein-membrane pattern is replaced by a honeycomb lattice defined by a few geometric parameters.
The finite-element modeling of the wings is based on evaluating structural dynamic properties, solving fully-coupled fluid-structure interactions problem for laminar flows, and performing multi-objective analysis of the target characteristics. Representative models are 3D-printed by an FDM printer (Ultimaker 3.0) from a TPU polymer and tested experimentally in permanent and transient dynamic regimes.

Results: The numerical results reveal that the wing exhibits the highest lift force when excited close to the first flexural resonance, the frequency of which perfectly agrees with the measured frequency of the 3D-printered wings. The optimization procedure shows that aerodynamic and vibroacoustic properties of the wings can be manipulated by varying the geometry of the honeycomb lattice.

Conclusions: The obtained results suggest a promising way to design easy-to-manufacture wings with predefined dimensions and controllable dynamics that opens broad perspectives for further developments of flying micro-robots.

Acknowledgements: The authors gratefully acknowledge the financial support of the ENTEG, the University of Groningen for conducting experiments.

Biography: Dr. Anastasiia O. Krushynska is an assistant professor on Dynamics and Vibration at the Engineering and Technology Institute Groningen, University of Groningen (the Netherlands) and a former Marie Sklodowska-Curie Research Fellow (2015-2016) at University of Torino (Italy). With a Ph.D. degree in Mechanics of Deformable Solids from Kiev National Taras Shevchenko University (2008, Ukraine), she worked as a post-doctoral researcher in Ukraine, the Netherlands, and Italy. Her research interests are in the field of wave dynamics of elastic solids, acoustics, material science, and mechanics. Since 2013, her research has been focused on acoustic and phononic metamaterials, and recently has been extended to mechanical metamaterials. She has published more than 35 papers in leading international peer-reviewed journals, including Advanced Functional Materials, Physical Review Letters, Applied Physics Letters, Journal of Mechanics and Physics of Solids, New Journals of Physics, and others, with some of them widely highlighted in the news and press-releases. Her research was distinguished by several individual research grants. Dr. Krushynska serves as a review and guest associate editor in several, a reviewer for 43 international peer-reviewed journals and several international conferences, and an external referee of the European Commission and three other funding agencies.