The flapping of the wings is the main difference between the method of flight of birds and insects and the airplanes we know
The hummingbird is a small songbird, known among other things for its flying skills. She is able to fly straight at high speed, maneuver with great agility as well as hover in place, while sucking nectar from flowers. These impressive capabilities have not gone unnoticed by aviation engineers, who seek to harness the knowledge acquired over millions of years of evolution, in favor of developing more efficient aircraft. "We're trying to learn how different flappers from nature are compared to aircraft we know and plan every day," says Dr. Yossi Elimelech, an aeronautical engineering researcher from the Technion. "The desire is to design advanced tiny aircraft of the next generation, which will be much smaller than the drones (tiny unmanned aircraft) that exist today, and from nature we see that birds do this while flapping their wings."
wet practice
The flapping of the wings is the main difference between the method of flight of birds and insects and the airplanes we know. Elimelech built models of the birds' wings, and a special device for examining them: a robotic arm that moves the wing inside a tank of water. The method makes it possible to follow the currents created by the movement of the wing, and try to understand the forces exerted on it at each and every point. The use of a watery environment, instead of air, makes it possible to follow the relatively slow movement of the wing, and to examine the currents it produces in the surrounding medium. The researchers use a wing that releases jets of ink into the water, or the water containing tiny paint particles. Sophisticated video recording makes it possible to examine the currents and analyze them mathematically. "The research started about three years ago with a basic study of the flow field around a fixed wing of a hummingbird," says Elimelech. "Then we investigated what happens around a rotating wing, to examine how similar it is to a helicopter propeller. The most complicated thing is analyzing the flow field around a flapping wing - acceleration, deceleration, rotation of the wing at the end of the stroke and re-acceleration again. This was done out of a desire to understand how the high lifting power and the high efficiency in the flight of the hummingbirds are obtained."
Security matter
The researchers hope that the knowledge that will be gathered about the physics of wing movements in hummingbirds, will make it possible to design a tiny plane that can apply these principles for high flight efficiency. With that said, the plane must be a similar size to the bird - a few centimeters - in order for it to function with similar efficiency. A larger aircraft will experience a much higher viscosity of the air, so its energy consumption will be too great. Elimelech himself will probably not be involved in aircraft development, at least in the coming years, and he prefers to focus for now on pure knowledge. In the next phase of the research, he is expected to examine the movement of the bat's wing, which has unique characteristics. "Bats do not flap their wings like hummingbirds, but they are endowed with very strong maneuverability," he explains. "We want to know to what extent the fact that their wing is membranous - that is, built mainly from a thin membrane - contributes to their upgraded flight performance compared to wings we know from day to day. We want to simulate aircraft that are bat-like."
The work of Elimelech and his colleagues on fixed wings - which do not flap - has already yielded some important insights into the flow of air around the wing and the formation of air vortices, insights which have a direct connection to the fuel and energy consumption of airplanes. If his research also leads to the construction of a tiny plane that can flap its wings like a bird, this will upgrade the field of tiny planes. Such drones could serve as an important tool in scanning dangerous areas, taking pictures and gathering information. It is no wonder that the research also attracts the attention of the security establishment, which even participates in its financing.
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The idea is to create a tiny and sophisticated flying vehicle based on the hummingbird, a very fast hummingbird, which with the help of its wings will be elastic, and will be powered by a motor mechanism for each side, which will allow it to fly up and stay there for the purpose of taking pictures and the like + a rocket engine that once you reach a certain height The operation of the wings stops, and the rocket thrust for flight begins and in front there will be sensors and heat receptors. The entire size of the aircraft is the size of a songbird and can be used for photography that the enemy will not be able to quickly discover. Is that what I think maybe?
Dear Camila,
Thanks for the detail, I'm convinced. I don't believe in any conspiracies of course. At most I toyed with the thought that they might have dressed this technology and the potential maneuverability inherent in it on some sort of smart bomb instead of thrust/steer by conventional means. so no…:)
Like I said just a little more in detail 🙂
This is how conspiracy theories of alien visits start (or rather continue)...
AK, you thought you were imagining and you were right, you did imagine. It seems that these are two missiles (and not smart bombs because there is a clearly visible backfire) that hit the target one after the other. The changes in the shape of the missile and the fragments are due to uneven emission of light (even if you photograph a candle you will get a similar phenomenon of "flickering"). Both the missiles and the shrapnel move in a predictable manner, the missiles maintain an almost perfectly straight line while the shrapnel trajectories look exactly as ballistic trajectories would look in XNUMXD space. The change in direction is the point where the upward vertical component is zeroed out and the shard begins to drop down. Also the delay for a fraction of a second is exactly what should happen in this transition. If you are willing to invest some time and test it experimentally, feel free to take a picture of a friend throwing a ball to all kinds of heights and from all kinds of angles and then you can see that you get similar behavior.
Beyond that, it simply doesn't make sense that what you see there is an innovative aircraft based on technology as described in the article, for several reasons:
A) It is still in early stages of development.
b) Due to technical limitations mentioned in the article, the size of such aircraft is expected to be a few centimeters, what you see in the photo is much, much larger and in any case an aircraft of a few centimeters will not be able to carry enough explosives to do this type of work.
c) What you see in the video moves very, very fast and the photo is projected in slow motion according to the reactivity of the fragments which indeed move slower than expected (but it does seem to move according to the correct paths according to the laws of physics). I'm not sure that the aircraft mentioned in the article will be able to move at such a speed. Aviation based on moving wings requires delicate control mechanisms that are not designed for high speeds, in fact at high speed the wings become a burden and birds of prey that reach high speeds tend to retract their wings and press them as close as possible to the body when they dive down to achieve high speed (and surprise) and even then they do not come close to achieve a speed that approaches the speed of missiles.
d) It is clearly seen that there is a rear thruster for the missiles, i.e. rocket propulsion that will enable the speed of the missiles. The whole idea of a flapping aircraft is to eliminate the need for a combustion based engine which is very heavy (because of the mechanism and the fuel).
e) It is a bit silly to use such a special and expensive development as a flying aircraft to replace a technology that does the job you see in the video in an excellent and relatively cheap way (missiles).
There are probably several more good reasons why it really doesn't make sense that the objects you see in the video are fluttering aircraft, I'm sure if you apply a little critical thinking you'll find a few more even without special knowledge of physics, image processing, etc.
This is definitely an illusion, note that all the fragments that fly after the explosion look like birds....
What seems to you like "standing in the air for a fraction of a second before they break a strong direction", is simply the moment when the fragments reach their peak height and then begin to fall back down, as you must have learned in physics classes, every body thrown into the air at a certain angle creates a parabola trajectory, and this Exactly what you see in the video.
I looked at this section over and over again. The flight of whatever it is seems to me to be too "tidy". They also stand in the air for a split second just before breaking direction extremely frantically, which doesn't sit well with me with shards or some sort of optical illusion/rendering.
I wonder what others think about it.
A.K. I noticed this too, but it's just an illusion related to image processing. Note that the two bombs that fall on the target, and then all the large fragments that fly in all directions (both right and left) look like birds with flapping wings.
As mentioned, this is just an illusion.
In the video of one of the countermeasures from Operation Pillar of Cloud, you see two such aircraft one after the other (starting at about the 20th second), when I first saw the video I thought I was imagining it, but apparently not...
Video Link:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ofg-glgT2k
what do you think?
You can jump straight to the demo, at minute 2:00
http://www.youtube.com/watch?hl=en&v=Fg_JcKSHUtQ&gl
Small correction:
Hummingbird is the popular name given to the Central American hummingbird,
"The hummingbird" is a German translation of the name of the scout family from Asia and Africa
In Hebrew it is called Scout,
There is another African animal in Hebrew called hummingbirds and their flight is similar to large birds,
Hummingbirds and Scouts fly similarly but are not close
Therefore it is appropriate to be precise,
It must be assumed that since the researchers are Israelis the attempt is to simulate
flight of a scout,
Since there are differences in the form of aviation between different MSs it is appropriate to be precise
It already exists
http://mobile.mako.co.il/hix-science/lab/Article-310aad3ed5c4531018.htm