Related papers: Bumblebee flight in heavy turbulence
Flapping insects are remarkably agile fliers, adapted to a highly turbulent environment. We present a series of high resolution numerical simulations of a bumblebee interacting with turbulent inflow. We consider both tethered and free…
In windy conditions, the air is turbulent. The strong and intermittent velocity variations of turbulence are invisible to flying animals. Nevertheless, flying animals, not much larger than the smallest scales of turbulence, manage to…
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…
High resolution direct numerical simulations of rotating and flapping bumblebee wings are presented and their aerodynamics is studied focusing on the role of leading edge vortices and the associated helicity production. We first study the…
Turbulent winds and gusts fluctuate on a wide range of timescales from milliseconds to minutes and longer, a range that overlaps the timescales of avian flight behavior, yet the importance of turbulence to avian behavior is unclear. By…
This work reports an experimental characterisation of the flow properties in a homogeneous bubble swarm rising at high-Reynolds-numbers within a homogeneous and isotropic turbulent flow. Both the gas volume fraction {\alpha} and 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.…
Turbulence is prevalent in nature and industry, from large-scale wave dynamics to small-scale combustion nozzle sprays. In addition to the multi-scale nonlinear complexity and both randomness and coherent structures in its dynamics,…
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…
Flight is a complicated task at small scales in part due to the ubiquitous unsteady air which contains it. Flying organisms deal with these difficulties using active and passive control mechanisms to steer their body motion. Body attitudes…
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…
Fluid turbulence is commonly associated with stronger drag, greater heat transfer, and more efficient mixing than in laminar flows. In many natural and industrial settings, turbulent liquid flows contain suspensions of dispersed bubbles and…
Turbulence grounds aircraft and combating it in flight requires energy, yet volant wildlife fly effortlessly even on windy days. The nature of the interactions between soaring birds and transient turbulent gusts is not clear, especially…
The present work investigates the mechanical behaviour of finite-size, elastic and inertial fibres freely moving in a homogeneous and isotropic turbulent flow at moderate Reynolds number. Fully-resolved, direct numerical simulations, based…
The movement of organisms is subject to a multitude of influences of widely varying character: from the bio-mechanics of the individual, over the interaction with the complex environment many animals live in, to evolutionary pressure and…
One-dimensional models are presented for transitional shear flows. The models have two variables corresponding to turbulence intensity and mean shear. These variables evolve according to simple equations based on known properties of…
The properties of bubble-laden turbulent flows at different scales are investigated experimentally, focusing on the flow kinetic energy, energy transfer, and extreme events. The experiments employed particle shadow velocimetry measurements…
Turbulence is the major cause of friction losses in transport processes and it is responsible for a drastic drag increase in flows over bounding surfaces. While much effort is invested into developing ways to control and reduce turbulence…
Numerical simulation of high-speed turbulent water jets in air and its validation with experimental data has not been reported in the literature. It is therefore aimed to simulate the physics of these high-speed water jets and compare the…
We analyze a way to make flight vehicles harvest energy from homogeneous turbulence by fast tracking in the way that falling inertial particles do. Mean airspeed increases relative to flight through quiescent fluid when turbulent eddies…