joseff, you're right, the reynolds number is smaller. I thought that the superhigh frequencies of insects with asinchronous muscles (1.000 hertzs) could provide a super-high speed, but it barely reaches 70 kph.
(if, for example, the stroke is 1 cm, each movement would move the wings 2 cm, and at 1000 vibrations per second, this means 20 meters per second, wich is roughly 70 kph).
So, the Reynolds number barely reaches 10000 for big insects.
Anyway, here there are two more examples, the first of a venation (the veins on the wing) that has millions of years of evolution behind (for "structural fans" here, it's a beauty, I think: try to do this with carbon fiber!), and the second is a "hairy" wing that I don't know if could be used on some surface by a crazy aerodynamicist:
Structure of a dragonfly wing. Notice how the size of the "cells" vary, probably according to the wing load at each particular position.
Intriguing insect hairy wing (for the Ferrari 2020? ).
Finally, heavily edited quotes from Wikipedia's "Insect flight", that I find very intriguing. Either I'm crazier than what I suppose (a good possibility) or
these animals seem to thrive in the vortexes caused by the previous wing stroke, unlike modern F1 cars, that have troubles with the wake caused by the preceding car:
"Identification of major forces is critical to understanding insect flight. The first attempts to understand flapping wings assumed a quasi-steady state... The calculated lift was too small by a factor of three, so researchers realized that must be unsteady phenomena providing aerodynamic forces. ... Through computational fluid dynamics, some researchers argue that there is no rotational effect. They claim that the high forces are caused by an interaction with the wake shed by the previous stroke.
...
One of the most important phenomena that occurs during insect flight is leading edge suction... At high angles of attack, the flow separates over the leading edge but reattaches before reaching the trailing edge. Within this bubble of separated flow is a vortex. Because the angle of attack is so high, there is a lot of momentum transferred downward into the flow. These two features create a large amount of lift force as well as some additional drag. The important feature, however, is the lift. Because the flow has separated, yet it still provides large amounts of lift, this phenomenon is called “delayed stall.” This effect was observed in flapping insect flight, and it was proven to be capable of providing enough lift to account for the deficiency in the quasi-steady state models.
All of the effects on a flapping wing can be reduced to three major sources of aerodynamic phenomena: the leading edge vortex, the steady-state aerodynamic forces on the wing, and the wing’s contact with its wake from previous strokes."
I only hope Newey reads this...
Anyway, I plan to follow with some structures for birds that I find have some promise... I suppose somebody must have tried to take a look before. Do you have any links for bionics and F1?