A numerical study of the sound and force production of flexible insect wings

Abstract

We numerically solved the acoustic and flow field around cicada wing models with parametrically varied flexibility using the hydrodynamic/acoustic splitting method. We observed a gradual change of sound directivity with flexibility. We found that flexible wings generally produce lower sound due to reduced aerodynamic forces, which were further found to scale with the dynamic pressure force defined as the integration of dynamic pressure over the wing area. Unlike conventional scaling where the incoming flow velocity is used as the reference to calculate the force coefficients, here only the normal component of the relative velocity of the wing to the flow was used to calculate the dynamic pressure, putting kinematic factors into the dynamic pressure force and leaving the more fundamental physics to the force coefficients. A high correlation was found between the aerodynamic forces and the dynamic pressure. The scaling is also supported by previously reported data of revolving wing experiments.