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Dynamic flight stability of hovering mosquitoes
- Source :
- Journal of theoretical biology. 464
- Publication Year :
- 2018
-
Abstract
- The flight of mosquitoes is unusual compared with many other insects, such as fruit-flies and honey bees: mosquitoes fly with their legs spread; they also have rather short stroke amplitude, hence use different aerodynamic mechanisms to produce lift. Could their flight-stability properties be different from those of other insects? Here, we first measured wing kinematics and morphological parameters of two hovering mosquitoes, and then use the method of computational fluid dynamics to compute the aerodynamic derivatives and the techniques of eigenvalue and eigenvector analysis to study their stability properties. We found that their natural-mode structure is the same as that of many other insects: for the longitudinal motion, one unstable oscillatory mode, one stable fast subsidence mode and one stable slow subsidence mode; for the lateral motion: an unstable divergence mode, a stable oscillatory mode and a stable subsidence mode. The different aerodynamic mechanisms of mosquitoes do not change the major aerodynamic derivatives. The spread legs of mosquitoes have great effect on the moments of inertia and make the eigenvalue of the stable lateral mode much smaller. However, the leg-spreading has only a small quantitative effect on the unstable eigenvalues: the magnitudes of the eigenvalues in the two unstable modes, or the growth rate of the disturbances, are reduced by approximately 11%, compared to those calculated without considering the spread legs.
- Subjects :
- 0301 basic medicine
Statistics and Probability
Computational fluid dynamics
Models, Biological
General Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology
03 medical and health sciences
Honey Bees
0302 clinical medicine
Animals
Wings, Animal
Eigenvalues and eigenvectors
Physics
General Immunology and Microbiology
business.industry
Applied Mathematics
fungi
General Medicine
Aerodynamics
Mechanics
Moment of inertia
Aerodynamic derivatives
030104 developmental biology
Amplitude
Culicidae
Modeling and Simulation
Flight, Animal
Flight stability
General Agricultural and Biological Sciences
business
030217 neurology & neurosurgery
Subjects
Details
- ISSN :
- 10958541
- Volume :
- 464
- Database :
- OpenAIRE
- Journal :
- Journal of theoretical biology
- Accession number :
- edsair.doi.dedup.....6626ffbb0d5e3df01a5f9495bcba49f1