Journal
SCIENCE ADVANCES
Volume 5, Issue 1, Pages -Publisher
AMER ASSOC ADVANCEMENT SCIENCE
DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.aat4269
Keywords
-
Categories
Funding
- Humboldt Foundation
- AFOSR MURI [AFOSR-FA9550-15-1-0009]
Ask authors/readers for more resources
Aves are an incredibly diverse class of animals, ranging greatly in size and thriving in a wide variety of environments. Here, we explore the scaling trends of bird wings in connection with their flight performance. The tensile strength of avian bone is hypothesized to be a limiting factor in scaling the humerus with mass, which is corroborated by its experimentally determined allometric scaling trend. We provide a mechanics analysis that explains the scaling allometry of the wing humerus length, L-H, with body weight W, L-H proportional to W-0.44. Lastly, wing feathers are demonstrated to generally scale isometrically with bird mass, with the exception of the spacing between barbules, which falls within the same range for birds of all masses. Our findings provide insight into the design of birds and may be translatable to more efficient bird-inspired aircraft structures.
Authors
I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.
Reviews
Recommended
No Data Available