Abstract
The covering feathers on the upper side of bird’s wings tend to pop up during the landing approach of birds and in flight through very turbulent air. Liebe’s (1938) explanation of this observation has been that flow separation can be limited by these covering feathers. An initial flight experiment with a piece of leather on one wing of a Messerschmitt Me 109 fighter aircraft (Liebe 1938) and previous experiments by Nachtigall, Wedekind & Dreher (1985) with bird’s wings do hint at an appreciable effect, but were somewhat preliminary. In the present experimental research project being carried out together with the Institute for Biophysics (Bionik und Evolutionstechnik) of the Technical University of Berlin and with the STEMME Aircraft Company, Strausberg, we investigate this particular effect, supported by the German Federal Ministry of Education, Science and Technology (BMBF). Our experimental setup consists of a real wing section of a STEMME S10 motor glider aircraft, inserted into our wind tunnel and attached to a force balance. The flow around the wing is two-dimensional. The wing section is a so called “laminar” airfoil, type HQ 41, developed by Horstmann & Quast, DLR Braunschweig. The Reynolds number range of our experiments is 1 ÷ 2 × 106, so that the lower flight velocities of the real aircraft are covered. This particular regime is relevant for the high-lift condition considered here.
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© 1996 Kluwer Academic Publishers
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Meyer, R., Bechert, D.W., Hage, W. (1996). Separation Control on a Glider Wing with Artificial Bird’s Feathers. In: Gavrilakis, S., Machiels, L., Monkewitz, P.A. (eds) Advances in Turbulence VI. Fluid Mechanics and its Applications, vol 36. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-0297-8_132
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-0297-8_132
Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht
Print ISBN: 978-94-010-6618-1
Online ISBN: 978-94-009-0297-8
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