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Master’s Thesis Defense by

Xiaomo "Terry" Zhang

“Flight Dynamics Simulation and Stability Control of Wingsuits”
Wednesday August 24, 1 p.m.
Montgomery/ Knight 317

Abstract

Modern wingsuit is defined as a special wearable suit that adds surface area to the human body to enable a significant increase in lift during flight through air. A wingsuit flight normally starts by a pilot jumping from a point that provides sufficient altitude for flight and ends by deploying a parachute. During a wingsuit flight, the pilot can adjust his or her arms and legs to make different body configurations, in order to modify the flight speed and flight path. Compared to conventional air vehicles, configurations and performance of wingsuits are affected more by human factors, such as the pilot’s body size, arm strength, stamina, and flight experience. Due to these issues, it is hard to study wingsuits and simulate wingsuit flight dynamics. For instance, in the history of the development of modern wingsuits, no full-sized wingsuit has ever been tested in wind tunnel to obtain data on wingsuit behavior under different settings and conditions. It will be an extensive and expensive process to conduct the wind tunnel set up and relevant preparation. To solve this problem, in this thesis, a reduced scale wingsuit model was designed and fabricated to fit in the low speed wind tunnel. This model was used to determine aerodynamic characteristics of wingsuits from wind tunnel tests. Since the measured aerodynamic loads were converted into dimensionless coefficients, the measured data was applied on a wingsuit air vehicle system, which consisted a pilot and a full size modern wingsuit. The wingsuit air vehicle was constructed and used for flight dynamics simulation and stability analysis on modes of vibration.

Committee:
Dr. John-Paul Clarke
Dr. Eric N. Johnson
Dr. Mark Costello (advisor)