Exciting two days of the 56th Israeli Conference on Aerospace Sciences, with Tzlil, Leeran, Etay and Kobi presenting their research studies. Below are pictures of happy Tzlil, Michael, Tuvia and myself receiving the Neev-ya prize from Rachel and David Durban (Neev-ya Prize), and of happy Kobi after giving a wonderful talk. All talks were beautiful. Happy and proud!

This year we walked the upper parts of the Northern section of the Trail, from Hermon to the Palsar 7 Memorial site. Beautiful pictures thanks to Yael and Etay!

Wind tunnel experiment of a membrane-strip flutter, which we used to validate the mathematical model. The “slow motion” is captured by a stroboscope.

This flutter demonstrator wing is printed in a 3D printer, together with its wind-tunnel attachment. The beam structure, made of Fine Polyamide PA-2200, is wrapped in adhesive paper. The weight at the wing tip trailing edge is designed to bring the flutter speed to ~40 m/s. Once at flutter, due to the excessive vibrations, the mass is ejected, flutter stops, and the wing is saved. Phew!

Here’s a video of the Flutter demonstrator in the wind tunnel. And also in slow motion.

Great pics thanks to Mickey Weidenfeld!!

Finally, a good side of aeroelasticity! We harnessed the fluttering membrane to generate electricity (well, a tiny bit of). It’s only a demonstrator, so please don’t be picky about the fact that we use a lot of electricity (the fan in the background) to generate ‘lil electricity (the LED). Credit for the device goes to Humdinger, http://www.humdingerwind.com.

First day(s) in the wind tunnel! Itzik Mizrahi and Daniel Kariv are studying the aeroelastic behavior of an elastic membrane in low speeds. The investigation includes numerical analysis and wind-tunnel testing of membranes of various configurations (geometries and loading). Check out our membrane performing the limit-cycle oscillations (LCO) ballet.