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Nature’s flyers have been an inspiration in the development of flapping wing MAVs. The secret to their flight has been attributed to the wing kinematics and wake patterns generated. The wing kinematics used in flapping wing studies is usually sinusoidal. But in reality, their flight motor dictates the kinematics. In the current work, a Duffing oscillator model of the insect flight motor is used to predict the kinematics in the presence wing loads predicted by a Navier-Stokes solver in a two-dimensional framework. This fluid-structure interaction problem uses a vortex method solver to solve for the fluid part and a Runge-Kutta solver to solve for the structural part. This work investigates different plunge kinematics exhibited the simplified insect flight motor and the corresponding wake structures. The initial simulations show simple periodic, almost sinusoidal and chaotic fluid-structure interaction responses.

Flapping wings, Discrete vortex method, Duffing oscillator, Fluid-Structure Interaction