Effects of Dragonfly Wing Vein Structure on the Flight Charateristics

The wings of dragonfly have been extensively researched for designing of Micro Air Vehicles (MAVs). The cross-sectional structure of the veins will be influent to flight characteristics of dragonfly. In this paper, elliptical and circular tube structures are found in vein by fluorescence microscope. Based on the results, model I and model II with elliptical and circular cross-sectional structural vein are established, respectively. By computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulation, the drag coefficient, lift coefficient and lift-to-drag ratio of model I and model II are obtained. It is shown that model I can generate greater lift and produce less resistance. The lift-to-drag ratio of model I is larger 50% than that of model II at an angle of attack of 60 degrees. It will be provided a bioinspiration to design a bionic flapping MAV.