Related papers: Leaf roll-up and aquaplaning in strong winds and f…
Flexible broad leaves are thought to reconfigure in the wind and water to reduce the drag forces that act upon them. Simple mathematical models of a flexible beam immersed in a two-dimensional flow will also exhibit this behavior. What is…
Crumpled paper or drapery patterns are everyday examples of how elastic sheets can respond to external forcing. In this Letter, we study experimentally a novel sort of forcing. We consider a circular flexible plate clamped at its center and…
The leaves of many plants are superhydrophobic, a property that may have evolved to clean the leaves by encouraging water droplets to bead up and roll off. Superhydrophobic surfaces can also exhibit reduced friction and liquids flowing over…
Flexible canopy flows are often encountered in natural scenarios, e.g., when crops sway in the wind or when submerged kelp forests are agitated by marine currents. Here, we provide a detailed characterisation of the turbulent flow developed…
Lotus leaves floating on water usually experience short-wavelength edge wrinkling that decays toward the center, while the leaves growing above water normally morph into a global bending cone shape with long rippled waves near the edge.…
Plants live in constantly moving fluid, whether air or water. In response to the loads associated with fluid motion, plants bend and twist, often with great amplitude. These large deformations are not found in traditional engineering…
The processing of thin-structured materials in a fluidic environment, from nearly inextensible but flexible graphene sheets to highly extensible polymer films, arises in many applications. So far, little is known about the dynamics of such…
Inspired by the wake-surfing nature of animals, this study aims to understand the aerodynamic force variation on a wing surfing in an unsteady 2-D wake. Wind tunnel experiments were conducted using Particle Image Velocimetry (PIV) and force…
A tentative scaling theory is presented of a tree swaying in a turbulent wind. It is argued that the turbulence of the air within the crown is in the inertial regime. An eddy causes a dynamic bending response of the branches according to a…
We investigate the hovering dynamics of rigid bodies with up-down asymmetry placed in oscillating background flows. Recent experiments on inanimate pyramid-shaped objects in oscillating flows with zero mean component demonstrate that the…
Wind shortwave instability of a foam layer between the atmosphere and the ocean is examined in order to reach greater understanding of the recent findings of the decrease in momentum transfer from hurricane winds to sea waves. The…
Our fluid dynamics video shows the response of a layer of viscoelastic fluid to an array of four-roll mills steadily rotating underneath. When the relaxation time of the fluid is sufficiently long, the fluid divides into "cells" with a…
Swimming and flying animals demonstrate remarkable adaptations to diverse flow conditions in their environments. In this study, we aim to advance the fundamental understanding of the interaction between flexible bodies and heterogeneous…
The goal of this note is to provide a theoretical explanation for the saturation of the drag coefficient in strong wind conditions. The hydrodynamic model under consideration takes into account the important effects of airborne droplets of…
Whereas most plants are flexible structures that undergo large deformations under flow, another process can occur when the plant is broken by heavy fluid-loading. We investigate here the mechanism of such possible breakage, focusing on the…
We investigate experimentally the effect of wind on the dynamics of a viscous liquid film flowing down a thread. The liquid film is well-known to destabilize into an axisymmetric bead-like pattern in stagnant air. When the flowing film is…
Stretching and retracting wingspan has been widely observed in the flight of birds and bats, and its effects on the aerodynamic performance particularly lift generation are intriguing. The rectangular flat-plate flapping wing with a…
The conformations and dynamics of semiflexible filaments subject to a homogeneous external (gravitational) field, e.g., in a centrifuge, are studied numerically and analytically. The competition between hydrodynamic drag and bending…
The effect of flexibility on the hydrodynamic loads and on the flow structures generated on a rectangular foil when oscillating in pitch has been studied. Hydrodynamic loads were measured with a 6-axes balance, and the flow structures were…
Over the past few decades, oscillating flexible foils have been used to study the physics of organismal propulsion in different fluid environments. Here we extend this work to a study of flexible foils in a frictional environment. When the…