Abstract: By unsteady numerical simulating, this paper investigates the aerodynamic performance influence on the horizontal tail caused from flapping wing’s pitching and plunging of a two dimensional model which is a flapping wing and horizontal tail combination in tandem model. We use the dynamic mesh technology to achieve flapping wing’s pitching and plunging in the numerical simulation part. This two airfoils combination is simplified from a micro flapping wing aerial vehicle ASN211, which is developed independently by Northwestern Polytechnical University. We analyze the impact of the aerodynamic efficiency on the horizontal tail from flapping wing unsteady wake through the unsteady flow field calculation by the computational fluid dynamics software Fluent. By comparing the lift curves both in the steady state and time average unsteady state, we can conclude that the flapping wing’s unsteady motion can enhance stalling angle and maximum lift coefficient of the horizontal tail, and hence improve the horizontal tail’s stall features.

Key words: flapping wing micro aerial vehicle, unsteady motion, dynamic mesh, horizontal tail, stall