great pic

Any idea of the species?

Butterfly Uses Monofilm

Some of them have very sail shaped wings too



Sail designers could learn a lot from studying butterfly wings.

This is so true.

Leonardo da vinci did some studies of an insect wing that showed it was more efficient than any wing that has been developed - something to do with the texture on the low pressure side.

There's an entire field of study called Bio inspiration where people look at evolved solutions and try to engineer their benefits into human constructions. When I win the lottery, I'm going to study it after my third world tour

Windxtasy said...

Some of them have very sail shaped wings too



Sail designers could learn a lot from studying butterfly wings.

Top half looks like a sail - bottom half looks like one I've had for a few months!!!

Windxtasy said...
Sail designers could learn a lot from studying butterfly wings.

Graphic designers could certainly use some inspiration from nature, however not so much for the engineers. Unfortunately the reynolds numbers are all wrong to make direct comparisons between the two...

I think that insects use vortices instead of laminar flow, which is why bumblebees can stay aloft when by conventional (laminar) physics they don't have the wing area to do so.

Strange things happen when you scale down to the size of an insect.

Windxtasy said...

Some of them have very sail shaped wings too



Sail designers could learn a lot from studying butterfly wings.

It's maybe a fair point in some ways, but on the other hand a few aerodynamicists have pointed out that they HAVE looked a lot at wings from nature, but the analogies are hard to take too far because apparent wind angles, wind speeds, purposes etc vary enormously when you go from a wing to a sail.

They also say that aerodynamics is such a complex area that it's rarely simply transferrable from one area to another; after all, the Concorde was very effective but it's got a very different shape to the very efficient pedal and solar-powered planes like Gossamer Condor or Rutan's Voyager. Even in windsurfers, a longboard sail is quite different in many ways to a speed sail.

By the way, to get the butterfly wings to look like sails from the point of view of the airflow, wouldn't the airflow would have to be flowing across the butterfly rather than along the butterfly?

neil pryde used to build race sails with an extreme luff curve compared to other manufacturers.

problem was they snapped masts like toothpicks.

less curve allows higher loads to be placed on the luff wthout the mast breaking.

that said, graphically those butterfly wings would work for me.

it seriously has to be winter in australia.....

we are having a conversation about how butterfly's look like windsurfers.

And, for no other reason but that it is so cool:

Windxtasy said...

The shape of those front wings is very similar to our sails, which have been developed through R & D to arrive at that shape. Perhaps the sails would perform even better if they were closer still to the butterfly shape. Look at that "mast bend curve".
I don't know a lot about aerodynamics but it seems to me at least that sail designers should reconsider orientation of battens to minimise turbulence over the foil so that the battens run more in the direction of the veins in the butterfly wing (red lines) which is the direction of air flow when the sail is raked back rather than the perpendicular to the mast pattern (yellow lines) that we have now.

battens are angled as much as they can be. The reason they arent to the extent of your red lines is due to batten length. By doing that it softened up the feel of the sail a bit too. This all happened 15 years back with the Gaastra F1 Flow and NP VX Ltd.

Also whether the airflow of a foil stay's attached is dependant on the length of the foil. With the foil length of our sails the seams and material changes wont trip the flow but battens can (just). But then sometimes having a turbulent flow across the foil isn't a bad thing as it can decrease total drag, hence the reason for turbulators on some aircraft wings.

FletcHuz said...

Windxtasy said...

Some of them have very sail shaped wings too



Sail designers could learn a lot from studying butterfly wings.

Neilpryde - The Fly
Neilpryde - Firefly

New range of gear especially for women

Neil Pryde - The Butterfly

Mens version:

Neil Pryde - The Moth

Someone mention X-ply? Dragonfly, fly and bee wings, just to name a small few, have these "veins" in their wings. I guess their purpose is twofold, feed the living wing and for tear resistance...the latter just like X-ply. Interesting though is the kink on the leading edge of the wing.