Until Mao Sun’s students started quizzing him about animal flight, he was mainly interested in the aerodynamics of aircraft, but their questions caught his imagination and set him off along a biological train of thought. At first his interest in insect flight was entirely academic, but recent developments in micro-aviation have made Sun’s calculations extremely relevant to modern aeronautic engineering.
Sun has solved the Navier-Stokes equations for fluid flowing around a flapping insect wing. These equations are the most complete mathematical description of the way a fluid moves around an object. But their complexity made it impossible to solve the equation analytically. The explosion of computational power at the end of the twentieth century, accompanied by the development of powerful algorithms, has allowed Sun and his colleagues at Beijing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics to solve these equations numerically.
Several labs have measured the total force at the wing-base exerted...
