About his PhD project

When an insect emerges from its pupae, its wings expand in a couple of minutes, prompted by the injection of hemolymph in a network of folded veins1-3. This rapid deployment exceeds our best engineering designs. The main goal of the project is to characterize the wing expansion in Drosophila, to develop a fundamental understanding of the underlying physical mechanisms in order to describe the fluid-structure interaction between the hemolymph injection and the deformation of the vein network and explain how the inflation of an individual vein, organized in a network, guides the expansion of a structure. The objective of the project is twofold: to understand the natural process through a biomechanics description on the one hand and to transfer the biological observation to prototypes on the other hand, opening the door for soft robotic application4-7 from compliant medical devices to deployable wings for ultra light drones.