In a new paper published in Science last week the Oxford group of animal flight, headed by Adrian Thomas, shows how important it is for a locust to have appropriate camber and wing twist to maintain the high performance achieved by insect wings. The way they do it is by using a CFD (computational Fluid Dynamics) model, and in a stepwise manner remove the camber and twist exhibited by the real locust. Before trusting the model output, the CFD model was validated against real data using smoke flow visualization and PIV measurements obtained from locusts tethered in the wind tunnel. In accompanying podcast Adrian explain certain problems they had in modeling the upstroke of the hind wings, so go an listen also for that.
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