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Studies of insect flight have revealed novel mechanisms of production of aerodynamic lift. In the present study, large lift forces were measured during flight episodes elicited from dragonflies tethered to a force balance. Simultaneously, stroboscopic photographs provided stop-action views of wing motion and the flowfield structure surrounding the insect. Wing kinematics were correlated with both instantaneous lift generation and vortex-dominated flow fields. The large lift forces appear to be produced by unsteady flow-wing interactions. This successful utilization of unsteady separated flows by insects may signal the existence of a whole new class of fluid dynamic uses that remain to be explored.
Somps et al. (Fri,) studied this question.