Numerical investigation of mechanical characteristics of dragonfly wing vein under various loadings

Dragonfly wings are extremely specialized flight organs, which consist of veins and membranes. So, from a bionic view, it is very important to clarify the microstructure effects on mechanical behavior of the wing elements. Based on the previous studies, the dragonfly wing vein has a complex sandwich structure with two chitinous shells and a protein layer. In the present study, it is focused on effects of the sandwich microstructure on mechanical response of the vein subjected to various mechanical loadings by introducing a new numerical approach. To this end, the vein is simulated as a simple tublar and a sandwich three-layered shell and the mechanical characteristics of the vein under various loadings are investigated using numerical methods. In vibrational and buckling analysis, the meshless local Petrov-Galerkin (MLPG) method is implemented, through the use of Donnell shell theory, to obtain the fundamental frequency and critical buckling load of the vein and the results are in good agreement with those determined by finite element method (FEM) using ANSYS software. Additionally, bending and torsional behaviors of the vein are analyzed numerically. Till now, most of the numerical analysis in insect flight investigations have applied the FE modeling and non of them has introduced any other numerical method in this field. From the results, it is found that the introduction of the soft protein layer brings a more flexible vein and the sandwich structure can be satisfied for the specialized requirements during the insect flight.

کلیدواژه ها:

dragonfly wing ، vein ، microstructure ، mechanical properties