Related papers: A Review on Fish Swimming and Bird/Insect Flight
Saving energy and enhancing performance are secular preoccupations shared by both nature and human beings. In animal locomotion, flapping flyers or swimmers rely on the flexibility of their wings or body to passively increase their…
Fluid dynamics, and flight in particular, is a domain where organisms challenge our understanding of its physics. Integrating the current knowledge of animal flight, we propose to revisit the use of live animals to study physical phenomena.…
A mechanical model of swimming and flying in an incompressible viscous fluid in the absence of gravity is studied on the basis of assumed equations of motion. The system is modeled as an assembly of rigid spheres subject to elastic direct…
It has been a long-standing problem how schooling fish optimize their motion by exploiting the vortices shed by the others. A recent experimental study showed that a pair of fish reduce energy consumption by matching the phases of their…
The complex formations exhibited by schooling fish have long been the object of fascination for biologists and physicists. However, the physical and sensory mechanisms leading to organized collective behavior remain elusive. On the physical…
Fish typically swim by periodic bending of their bodies. Bending seems to follow a universal rule; it occurs at about one-third from the posterior end of the fish body with a maximum bending angle of about $30^o$. However, the hydrodynamic…
Many swimmers, especially small to medium-sized animals, use intermittent locomotion that differs from continuous swimming of large species. This type of locomotion, called burst-and-coast, is often associated with an energetic advantage.…
Wing flapping is one of the most widespread propulsion methods found in nature; however, the current understanding of the aerodynamics in bird wakes is incomplete. The role of the unsteady motion in the flow and its contribution to the…
Inviscid computational results are presented on a self-propelled swimmer modeled as a virtual body combined with a two-dimensional hydrofoil pitching intermittently about its leading edge. Lighthill (1971) originally proposed that this…
Insects use flight muscles attached at the base of the wings to produce impressive wing flapping frequencies. The maximum power output of these flight muscles is insufficient to maintain such wing oscillations unless there is good elastic…
Fish in schooling formations navigate complex flow-fields replete with mechanical energy in the vortex wakes of their companions. Their schooling behaviour has been associated with evolutionary advantages including collective energy…
Fish often travel in highly organized schools. One of the most quoted functions of these configurations is energy savings. Here, we verified the hypothesis and explored the mechanism through series of experiments on "schooling" robotic…
This paper addresses the physical mechanism of intermittent swimming by considering the burst-and-coast regime of fish swimming at different speeds. The burst-and-coast regime consists of a cycle with two successive phases: a phase of…
Collective locomotion of swimming and flying animals is fascinating in terms of individual-level fluid mechanics and group-level structure and dynamics. Here we bridge and relate these scales through a model of formation flight that views…
Wing flexibility plays an essential role in the aerodynamic performance of insects due to the considerable deformation of their wings during flight under the impact of inertial and aerodynamic forces. These forces come from the complex wing…
Fish swim by undulating their bodies. These propulsive motions require coordinated shape changes of a body that interacts with its fluid environment, but the specific shape coordination that leads to robust turning and swimming motions…
A theory is presented for wave-driven propulsion of floating bodies driven into oscillation at the fluid interface. By coupling the equations of motion of the body to a quasi-potential flow model of the fluid, we derive expressions for the…
Birds rely on active high-acceleration morphing and flapping to navigate complex airflows, but they can also maintain stable fixed-wing postures under persistent atmospheric disturbances. Here, we show that avian wings exhibit aerodynamic…
The propulsion of a flapping wing or foil is emblematic of bird flight and fish swimming. Previous studies have identified hallmarks of the propulsive dynamics that have been attributed to unsteady effects such as the formation and shedding…
Actuating periodically an elastic filament in a viscous liquid generally breaks the constraints of Purcell's scallop theorem, resulting in the generation of a net propulsive force. This observation suggests a method to design simple…