Aerodynamic compensation of wing damage in houseflies

Flying insects, spectacular little flapping machines with enormous evolutionary success, are an invaluable source of inspiration for an interdisciplinary community of scientists. The aerodynamic mechanisms insects use for propulsion are quite different from human-designed flying machines, and many aspects of their locomotion are not yet understood. In this talk, we will discuss the flight of the housefly (Musca domestica) with broken wings. We combine wing wear experiments, in which we study how wing damage progresses over time, with state of the art numerical simulations of the aerodynamics of flies with broken wings. The numerical simulations are done with our in-house open-source solver WABBIT (Engels et al. Commun. Comput. Phys., doi:10.4208/cicp.OA-2020-0246), which combines wavelet-based adaptivity with an efficient parallelization to exploit massively parallel supercomputers. A combination of these high-fidelity data, a simple aerodynamic model and a full-scale simulation predicts the energetic cost of flight with broken wings. In sum, the results allow us to estimate locomotor reserves of a flying fly, which provides valuable guidelines for the design of aerial robots using flapping wings for propulsion.