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Textured hydrophobic surfaces that repel liquid droplets unidirectionally are found in nature such as butterfly wings and ryegrass leaves and are also essential in technological processes such as self-cleaning and anti-icing. However,…

Hummingbirds and insects achieve outstanding flight performance by adapting their flapping motion to the flight requirements. Their wing kinematics can change from smooth flapping to highly dynamic waveforms, generating unsteady aerodynamic…

Natural fliers like bats exploit the complex fluid-structure interaction between their flexible membrane wings and the air with great ease. Yet, replicating and scaling the balance between the structural and fluid-dynamical parameters of…

Flapping-wing insects, birds, and robots are thought to offset the high power cost of oscillatory wing motion by using elastic elements for energy storage and return. Insects possess highly resilient elastic regions in their flight anatomy…

We investigate the interfacial dynamics involved in the impact of a droplet on a liquid-liquid system, which involves the impingement of an immiscible core liquid drop from a vertical separation onto an interfacial shell liquid layer…

We study the mechanical contact between a deformable body with a wavy surface and a rigid flat taking into account pressurized fluid trapped in the interface. A finite element model is formulated for a general problem of trapped fluid for…

Tail bending associated with maneuvering flight of insects is a known phenomenon although there are only a few studies which analyze and quantify the effects and benefits of body configuration changes. We hypothesized that these…

Scientific progress within the last few decades has revealed the functional morphology of an insect's sticky footpads -- a soft, sponge-like pad that secretes a thin liquid film. However, the physico-chemical mechanisms underlying their…

The natural wind environment that volant insects encounter is unsteady and highly complex, posing significant flight control and stability challenges. Unsteady airflows can range from structured chains of discrete vortices shed in the wake…

Autonomous landing on sloped terrain poses significant challenges for small, lightweight spacecraft, such as rotorcraft and landers. These vehicles have limited processing capability and payload capacity, which makes advanced deep learning…

We consider the behaviour of a dielectric fluid-fluid interface in the presence of a strong electric field from a point charge and line charge, respectively, both statically and, in the latter case, dynamically. The fluid surface is…

The localized loading of an elastic sheet floating on a liquid bath occurs at scales from a frog sitting on a lily pad to a volcano supported by the Earth's tectonic plates. The load is supported by a combination of the stresses within the…

Turbulence is omnipresent in the atmosphere and a long-standing scientific conundrum that makes flight complex. This complexity is little understood; surprisingly, when turbulence arises, air vehicles struggle while birds seem to thrive.…

The influence of the external pressure and surface energy on the wetting transition at nanotextured interfaces is studied using molecular dynamics and continuum simulations. The surface roughness of the composite interface is introduced via…

This expository review is devoted to fish swimming and bird/insect flight. (i) The simple waving motion of an elongated flexible ribbon plate of constant width, immersed in a fluid at rest, propagating a wave distally down the plate to swim…

Tree frogs are able take advantage of an interconnected network of epithelial cells in their toe pads to modulate their adhesion to surfaces under dry, wet, and flooded environments. It has been hypothesized that these interconnected…

We employ a novel computational modeling framework to perform high-fidelity direct numerical simulations of aero-structural interactions in bat-inspired membrane wings. The wing of a bat consists of an elastic membrane supported by a highly…

We study the interface between a solid trapped within a bath of liquid by a suitably shaped non-uniform external potential. Such a potential may be constructed using lasers, external electric or magnetic fields or a surface template. We…

The unique structural properties of interfacial water are at the heart of a vast range of important processes in electrochemistry, climate science, and biophysics. At interfaces, water molecules exhibit preferential orientations and an…

Bristled and membranous insect wings have co-evolved despite apparently serving the same functionality. We emulate flight physics using an automated free-fall experiment to better understand how and why several distinct wing forms may have…