This paper aims to study the trimmed hovering flight of a flapping wing micro air vehicle. For obtaining the trim conditions in hovering flight, the study utilizes a nonlinear aeroelastic model of the flapping wings to compute the forces and moments in the body frame. A realistic hover-capable flapping-wing MAV utilizes highly flexible wings operating at high frequencies/amplitudes, causing extreme wing deflections and highly unsteady, vortical flows. The strong fluid-structure coupling and the complicated flow physics make the performance of such a system extremely difficult to predict. A potential-flow-based unsteady aerodynamic model is coupled with geometrically exact structural model to generate a highly efficient aeroelastic framework. Coupled trim analysis is then performed by simultaneously solving wing response equations and vehicle trim equations until trim controls, wing response, inflow and circulation converge all together. The dependence of control inputs on weight and center of gravity (cg) location of the vehicle are studied for hover cases.
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