Perpustakaan Digital ITB

Bandung Institute of Technology (ITB) Laboratory of Aerogasdynamic is currently developing and conduct researchs in order to investigate flapping flight aerodynamics. Previous researchs were focusing on the study of velocity of vorticity field in flapping flight using Particle Image Velocimetry (PIV) tool. Nonetheless, force measurement of flapping flight has not been extensively done by this laboratory, so instrument to measure force generated by flapping flight need to be developed to fulfill this objective. This force measurement instrument will be used as a tool to study force generation due to various modes of flapping flight. The present work is mainly concerned about the development of dynamic load cell to measure the force generated by flapping flight. The thesis consists of development of the load cell and the data acquisition system to fulfill this purpose. To build the load cell, an approach of low-cost was employed since commercially available load cell for low capacity force is very expensive. Data acquisition system was built to be able to collect the data into computer for comfortable real-time force measurement and data processing, the data acquisition system is built based on microcontroller. The force measurement instrument is designed to measure normal force generated by flapping flight, which defined as the force in direction normal to the wing’s chord. The load cell is validated by several runs of experiment in towing tank and compare to existed reference. From the validation, it was found that the force measurement system that has been developed is capable to continuously measure force generated from flapping flight in real-time experiment.