Aerodynamic effects of wing corrugation at gliding flight at low Reynolds numbers

Corrugation gives an insect-wing the advantages of low mass, high stiffness, and low membrane stress. Researchers are interested to know if it is also advantageous aerodynamically. Previous works reported that corrugation enhanced the aerodynamic performance of wings at gliding flight. However, Reynolds numbers considered in these studies were higher than that of gliding insects. The present study showed that in the Reynolds number range of gliding insects, corrugation had negative aerodynamic effects. We studied aerodynamic effects of corrugation at gliding motion using the method of computational fluid dynamics, in the Reynolds number range of Re = 200–2400. Different corrugation patterns were considered. The effect of corrugation on aerodynamic performance was identified by comparing the aerodynamic forces between the corrugated and flat-plate wings, and the underlying flow mechanisms of the corrugation effects were revealed by analyzing the flow fields and surface pressure distributions. The findings are as follows: (1) the effect of corrugation is to decrease the lift, and change the drag only slightly (at 15°–25° angles of attack, lift is decreased by about 16%; at smaller angles of attack, the percentage of lift reduction is even larger because the lift is small). (2) Two mechanisms are responsible for the lift reduction. One is that the pleats at the lower surface of the corrugated wing produce relatively strong vortices, resulting in local low-pressure regions on the lower surface of the wing. The other is that corrugation near the leading edge pushes the leading-edge-separation layer slightly upwards and increases the size of the separation bubble above the upper surface, reducing the “suction pressure,” or increasing the pressure, on the upper surface.