In this article, elastic fibers were mixed into pure shape memory polymers to solve these problems. Due to these disadvantages, the shape memory polymers are not safe and reliable enough for application. However, pure shape memory polymers are brittle in their glassy state, and in their rubbery state, they tear rapidly along micro-cracks formed under tension. Shape memory polymer skins undergo large strain in their flexible, rubbery state and resist aerodynamic loads in their stiff, glassy state. Shape memory polymers are temperature-controlled variable stiffness materials, which have potential for use as morphing skins. The good agreement between the electromechanical model and the actuators shows that the analytical electromechanical model can accurately describe the large nonlinear quasi-static deflection behavior of IPMC actuators. The electromechanical model is then validated against the experimental results obtained from Pt- and Ag-IPMC actuators under various excitation voltages. Then an irreversible thermodynamic model that could predict the curvature of a unit part of an IPMC actuator is combined with the electrical model so that an analytical electromechanical model is developed. A distributed electrical model was modified for calculating the distribution of voltage along the bending actuator. In this research, IPMC samples with Pt and Ag electrodes were manufactured, and the large nonlinear deformation and the effect of curvature on surface electrode resistance of the IPMC samples were investigated experimentally and theoretically. But now I need bigger wings.This paper develops analytical electromechanical formulas to predict the mechanical deformation of ionic polymer–metal composite (IPMC) cantilever actuators under DC excitation voltages. Balsa wood has a density of about 160 kg/m 3. This would be a balsa-wood volume of 0.134 m 3. If I built them out of balsa wood, how much mass would it add? Lets just estimate an average wing thickness of 1 cm and a width of 2 meters. Right? Well, how much do you think 6.7 meter long wings would weigh? I doubt that wing mass is negligible. If I put 70 kg in for the mass in my function, I get a wingspan of 6.7 meters. If a human was a bird, what kind of wingspan would this Big Bird have? Let me take a grown human male with a mass of 70 kg. I could probably get a better function, but this will do for now. It looks nice except it doesn't seem to fit very well with the smaller mass birds. This fit gives a slope of 0.64 m 2/kg and a intercept of 0.62 m 2. This should be a linear function and I can find the slope.

In order to find the constant C, I will plot w 2 vs. This isn't really what I would have expected, but I will run with it. Where w is the wingspan, m is the mass and C is some constant. This would suggest a function something like: I could just start guessing functions to see what works, or I could see what makes sense. But what next? It would be nice if I could fit some function to this data.

Well, that turned out a little bit better than I expected. I started with this page on Wikipedia and just followed links almost at random. Almost all of this data has been scraped from Wikipedia. Let me look at a whole bunch of birds and see if there is a correlation between mass and wingspan.

Fly like a bird 2