University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, CA, USA.
INM - Leibniz Institute for New Materials and Saarland University, Saarbrücken, Germany.
Sci Adv. 2019 Jan 16;5(1):eaat4269. doi: 10.1126/sciadv.aat4269. eCollection 2019 Jan.
Aves are an incredibly diverse class of animals, ranging greatly in size and thriving in a wide variety of environments. Here, we explore the scaling trends of bird wings in connection with their flight performance. The tensile strength of avian bone is hypothesized to be a limiting factor in scaling the humerus with mass, which is corroborated by its experimentally determined allometric scaling trend. We provide a mechanics analysis that explains the scaling allometry of the wing humerus length, , with body weight , ∝ . Lastly, wing feathers are demonstrated to generally scale isometrically with bird mass, with the exception of the spacing between barbules, which falls within the same range for birds of all masses. Our findings provide insight into the "design" of birds and may be translatable to more efficient bird-inspired aircraft structures.
鸟类是一类非常多样化的动物，其体型差异极大，在各种环境中都能茁壮成长。在这里，我们探讨了鸟类翅膀的缩放趋势与其飞行性能之间的关系。鸟类骨骼的拉伸强度被假设为限制肱骨与质量缩放的因素，这一假设得到了其实验确定的比例缩放趋势的证实。我们提供了一种力学分析，解释了翼肱骨长度 与体重 之间的缩放比例关系， 。最后，翅膀羽毛的质量与鸟类的质量呈等比例缩放，除了羽小枝之间的间距外，所有鸟类的羽小枝间距都在相同的范围内。我们的发现为鸟类的“设计”提供了深入的了解，并且可能适用于更高效的鸟类启发式飞机结构。
