Les drones pourraient « voler indéfiniment » grâce à l’albatros, une avancée qui bouleverse l’industrie aéronautique et menace l’emploi des pilotes - HelloBiz.fr

Les avancées technologiques s'inspirant de la nature ne cessent de révolutionner le monde de l'aviation. Le professeur Sameh Elsa, de l'université de Californie, et son équipe travaillent sur un projet novateur : concevoir des drones inspirés par les techniques de vol des albatros. Ces oiseaux, parmi les plus grands au monde avec une envergure de

Dynamic soaring - Wikipedia

'Dynamic Soaring' Trick Could Speed Spacecraft Across Interstellar Space

Sailing to the stars on the scale of human lifetimes could be a matter of choosing the right kind of wind.

New research unlocks clues about the iconic flight of the wandering albatross

Wandering albatrosses, which are an iconic sight in the Southern Ocean, are highly adapted to long-distance soaring flight. Their wingspan of up to 11 feet is the largest known of any living bird, and yet wandering albatrosses fly while hardly flapping their wings. Instead, they depend on dynamic soaring—which exploits wind shear near the ocean surface to gain energy—in addition to updrafts and turbulence.

Dynamic soaring as a means to exceed the solar wind speed

A technique by which a spacecraft can interact with flows of ionized gas in space (the solar wind or interstellar medium) in order to be accelerated to velocities greater than the flow velocity is explored. Inspired by the dynamic soaring maneuvers performed by sea birds and gliders in which differences in wind speed are exploited to gain velocity, in the proposed technique a lift-generating spacecraft circles between regions of the heliosphere that have different wind speeds, gaining energy in the process without the use of propellant and only modest onboard power requirements. In the simplest analysis, the spacecraft motion can be modeled as a series of elastic collisions between regions of the medium moving at different speeds. More detailed models of the spacecraft trajectory are developed to predict the potential velocity gains and the maximum velocity that may be achieved in terms of the lift-to-drag ratio of the vehicle. A lift-generating mechanism is proposed in which power is extracted from the flow over the vehicle in the flight direction and then used to accelerate the surrounding medium in the transverse direction, generating lift (i.e., a force perpendicular to the flow). Large values of lift-to-drag ratio are shown to be possible in the case where a small transverse velocity is imparted over a large area of interaction. The requirement for a large interaction area in the extremely low density of the heliosphere precludes the use of a physical wing, but the us...