Throughout the history of human aviation, flying animals such as birds have been a tremendous source of inspiration for design and innovation of engineering aircraft. Today’s aircraft can be orders of magnitude faster and more powerful than animal flight.  However, the unique wing designs of birds, bats, and aerial insects, and the superior flight performance enabled by those wings, continue to motivate many who wish to duplicate nature’s capability. In this talk, I will discuss some of the distinct aspects of animal flight, and I will particularly focus on our recent understanding of unsteady three-dimensional aerodynamics and aeroelasticity of the flapping wings through computational fluid dynamics (CFD) and computational fluid-structure interaction (FSI) modeling approaches.  

Dr. Haoxiang Luo is an Associate Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Vanderbilt University, and he has a secondary appointment in the Department of Otolaryngology at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine.  He obtained his Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees from Tsinghua University in China, and Ph.D. from University of California, San Diego (UCSD), all degrees in mechanical engineering.  He had postdoctoral training at UCSD and George Washington University before he joined Vanderbilt University in 2007.  Dr. Luo received the Doctoral New Investigator award from the American Chemical Society, Petroleum Research Fund in 2008, the National Science Foundation (NSF) Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) award in 2010, and General H.H. Arnold award from the AIAA Tennessee Section in 2013.  He is a member of APS, AIAA (Associate Fellow), ASME, and ASEE.  He is currently serving on the AIAA Fluid Dynamics Technical Committee.