Analyzing the efficiency of aircraft using biomimetic wings

Overall, you have completed a creative and innovative project – great work! You also did a very nice job describing the scientific principles that informed the design of your project and describing your rationale. You described your science in a way that is easy to understand for readers who might not have the same background as you, which is an important skill to have a scientist that I hope you continue to develop! It was also very interesting to see your CAD models and visualization. It is clear that you have thought very deeply about your project, the rationale for your project and design principles. I’m excited to see future versions of your manuscript! 

You did a great job of providing the necessary background information to describe the two parameters being assessed: drag and lift. You also did an excellent job providing nformation about which structures were being mimicked by the aircraft, with helpful descriptions about why these structures were decided and how these structures could specifically address the research question provided by the author. You also did a good job of highlighting the scientific gap you are trying to address: CO2 emissions from aircraft. 

For future revisions of your manuscript, I would recommend more explicitly linking lift and drag to carbon dioxide emissions. It would also help to describe how these contribute to efficiency. From my understanding of your manuscript, you are looking specifically at aerodynamic efficiency or the lift-to-drag ratio. It would be helpful to describe to your readers why this is important and why having a higher lift to drag ratio would lead to less engine thrust, which could decrease CO2 emissions. Adding this information will help your readers connect the scientific gap you are trying to address(aircraft CO2 emissions increasing) to the methods you are using to address the gap (redesigning aircraft). Your manuscript will be read by individuals with different backgrounds than yours, so it is important to make sure that your readers can understand how your study directly addresses the research gap you have identified. 

Your hypothesis is easy to understand and was also present in both the introduction and summary. This makes it very easy to follow along with the goals of your study while reading the manuscript. Your introduction also makes it easy to understand how you arrived at your hypothesis. 

In your hypothesis, you mention carbon emissions. However, you did not measure this in your studies. Since you did not test this part of your hypothesis directly, this part of your hypothesis should be removed since this was not measured. Your hypothesis should reflect what you directly studied and observed. 

In your hypothesis, you also use the term “lift-to-drag” ratio which is a term that you did not define in your introduction. Instead, your introduction focused on defining lift and drag separately, but you did not discuss what the lift-to-drag ratio was or identify this as a measure of aircraft efficiency. A general rule of thumb in scientific writing is that you want your introduction to provide the necessary background information needed to understand your hypothesis/how you arrived to your hypothesis. 

Your experimental design is very well thought out and explained. It is also easy to understand what design principles were used in your CAD process. It is also clear the level of thought and work that was put into your study, and I hope you take time to be proud of your hard work! I also enjoyed seeing the properties of a humpback whale’s tubercles and eagle primary features being reflected in your designs. Your experiments align with the aims of the paper, so I do not think you need to conduct additional studies before submitting your work to a peer-reviewed journal. Great job on your materials and methods section too – the goal of the materials and methods section so that a scientist who is interested in repeating your experiments can replicate your experiments easily.

Your discussion does a great job of summarizing the results and interpreting what these mean. You also do a good job of explaining how your results could be applied to real-world aircraft. The limitations of your project were also described clearly and re-emphasizing the importance of your work (increased carbon emissions) at the end of your discussion was also helpful and good for the arguments you were trying to make. Your concluding sentence was also excellent and did a good job of emphasizing the significance of your results. 

You often say your results “validated” your hypothesis, but something that is important in science is that your hypothesis is either “supported” or “not supported”. This is because a  hypothesis can never be fully proven because we scientists cannot test everything in the universe in just one study. Your results definitely support your hypothesis, but you need to be careful when describing your results. 

Your discussion should also describe if there has been any other similar work done and not just summarize or present data that was not described in the results. Have biomimetic wings been studied before? Did people study the same organism or structures as you? If not, it is important to emphasize that in your study. However, if people have made similar efforts, it is helpful to discuss these in your discussions. 

The figures that you provided were easy to understand, and the figure captions were helpful for interpreting your figures. I especially appreciated that you included a diagram of conventional wings so it was easy to identify the differences in designs.  It is also helpful and easy to understand that you split your analyses into phases. Nice job! 

One thing about your figures is you have subpanels [(A), (B), etc.)] in your figure captions, but these are not present on your figures. For future submissions, please make sure to add these labels so they can easily identify which data you are referring to. 

For your figure legends, any interpretation of your data should be in the discussion. Your figure legends should be focused on providing information about where this data comes from, related statistics and whether you repeated these experiments. I recommend you read our guide on figure captions (here) about what we expect. You can also find an annotated figure caption here too. 

Since you calculated statistics, you will want to indicate this in your figures. Many scientists often put a star (*) on their figures, then define what the start means. I would recommend you read through a few articles in the Journal of Emerging Investigators where statistical significance is noted for reference. Here is an example: JEI-24-179. 

Your figures are very small which may make it difficult for your readers to interpret your results. You may want to stack your figures on top of each other rather than putting them side-by-side. This way, you could make each figure larger so it is easier for your readers to interpret your results.