Pump or coast: the role of resonance and passive energy recapture in medusan swimming performance

2019 ◽  
Vol 863 ◽  
pp. 1031-1061 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexander P. Hoover ◽  
Antonio J. Porras ◽  
Laura A. Miller

Diverse organisms that swim and fly in the inertial regime use the flapping or pumping of flexible appendages and cavities to propel themselves through a fluid. It has long been postulated that the speed and efficiency of locomotion are optimized by oscillating these appendages at their frequency of free vibration. In jellyfish swimming, a significant contribution to locomotory efficiency has been attributed to the effects passive energy recapture, whereby the bell is passively propelled through the fluid through its interaction with stopping vortex rings formed during each expansion of the bell. In this paper, we investigate the interplay between resonance and passive energy recapture using a three-dimensional implementation of the immersed boundary method to solve the fluid–structure interaction of an elastic oblate jellyfish bell propelling itself through a viscous fluid. The motion is generated through a fixed duration application of active tension to the bell margin, which mimics the action of the coronal swimming muscles. The pulsing frequency is then varied by altering the length of time between the application of applied tension. We find that the swimming speed is maximized when the bell is driven at its resonant frequency. However, the cost of transport is maximized by driving the bell at lower frequencies whereby the jellyfish passively coasts between active contractions through its interaction with the stopping vortex ring. Furthermore, the thrust generated by passive energy recapture was found to be dependent on the elastic properties of the jellyfish bell.

2020 ◽  
Vol 60 (5) ◽  
pp. 1221-1235 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicholas A Battista

Synopsis Computational scientists have investigated swimming performance across a multitude of different systems for decades. Most models depend on numerous model input parameters and performance is sensitive to those parameters. In this article, parameter subspaces are qualitatively identified in which there exists enhanced swimming performance for an idealized, simple swimming model that resembles a Caenorhabditis elegans, an organism that exhibits an anguilliform mode of locomotion. The computational model uses the immersed boundary method to solve the fluid-interaction system. The 1D swimmer propagates itself forward by dynamically changing its preferred body curvature. Observations indicate that the swimmer’s performance appears more sensitive to fluid scale and stroke frequency, rather than variations in the velocity and acceleration of either its upstroke or downstroke as a whole. Pareto-like optimal fronts were also identified within the data for the cost of transport and swimming speed. While this methodology allows one to locate robust parameter subspaces for desired performance in a straight-forward manner, it comes at the cost of simulating orders of magnitude more simulations than traditional fluid–structure interaction studies.


Fluids ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 4 (3) ◽  
pp. 169 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jason G. Miles ◽  
Nicholas A. Battista

Jellyfish are majestic, energy-efficient, and one of the oldest species that inhabit the oceans. It is perhaps the second item, their efficiency, that has captivated scientists for decades into investigating their locomotive behavior. Yet, no one has specifically explored the role that their tentacles and oral arms may have on their potential swimming performance. We perform comparative in silico experiments to study how tentacle/oral arm number, length, placement, and density affect forward swimming speeds, cost of transport, and fluid mixing. An open source implementation of the immersed boundary method was used (IB2d) to solve the fully coupled fluid–structure interaction problem of an idealized flexible jellyfish bell with poroelastic tentacles/oral arms in a viscous, incompressible fluid. Overall tentacles/oral arms inhibit forward swimming speeds, by appearing to suppress vortex formation. Nonlinear relationships between length and fluid scale (Reynolds Number) as well as tentacle/oral arm number, density, and placement are observed, illustrating that small changes in morphology could result in significant decreases in swimming speeds, in some cases by upwards of 80–90% between cases with or without tentacles/oral arms.


2021 ◽  
Vol 233 ◽  
pp. 109189
Author(s):  
Bin Yan ◽  
Wei Bai ◽  
Sheng-Chao Jiang ◽  
Peiwen Cong ◽  
Dezhi Ning ◽  
...  

2021 ◽  
Vol 103 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Shuvayan Brahmachary ◽  
Ganesh Natarajan ◽  
Vinayak Kulkarni ◽  
Niranjan Sahoo ◽  
V. Ashok ◽  
...  

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Junshi Wang ◽  
Vadim Pavlov ◽  
Zhipeng Lou ◽  
Haibo Dong

Abstract Dolphins are known for their outstanding swimming performance. However, the difference in flow physics at different speeds remains elusive. In this work, the underlying mechanisms of dolphin swimming at three speeds, 2 m/s, 5 m/s, and 8 m/s, are explored using a combined experimental and numerical approach. Using the scanned CAD model of the Atlantic white-sided dolphin (Lagenorhynchus acutus) and virtual skeleton-based surface reconstruction method, a three-dimensional high-fidelity computational model is obtained with time-varying kinematics. A sharp-interface immersed-boundary-method (IBM) based direct numerical simulation (DNS) solver is employed to calculate the corresponding thrust production, wake structure, and surface pressure at different swimming speeds. It is found that the fluke keeps its effective angle of attack at high values for about 60% of each stroke. The total pressure force coefficient along the x-axis converges as the speed increase. The flow and surface pressure analysis both show considerable differences between lower (2 m/s) and higher (5 m/s and 8 m/s) speeds. The results from this work help to bring new insight into understanding the force generation mechanisms of the highly efficient dolphin swimming and offer potential suggestions to the future designs of unmanned underwater vehicles.


2016 ◽  
Vol 3 (10) ◽  
pp. 160406 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gil Iosilevskii ◽  
Yannis P. Papastamatiou

Sharks have a distinctive shape that remained practically unchanged through hundreds of millions of years of evolution. Nonetheless, there are variations of this shape that vary between and within species. We attempt to explain these variations by examining the partial derivatives of the cost of transport of a generic shark with respect to buoyancy, span and chord of its pectoral fins, length, girth and body temperature. Our analysis predicts an intricate relation between these parameters, suggesting that ectothermic species residing in cooler temperatures must either have longer pectoral fins and/or be more buoyant in order to maintain swimming performance. It also suggests that, in general, the buoyancy must increase with size, and therefore, there must be ontogenetic changes within a species, with individuals getting more buoyant as they grow. Pelagic species seem to have near optimally sized fins (which minimize the cost of transport), but the majority of reef sharks could have reduced the cost of transport by increasing the size of their fins. The fact that they do not implies negative selection, probably owing to decreased manoeuvrability in confined spaces (e.g. foraging on a reef).


2018 ◽  
Vol 841 ◽  
pp. 1073-1084 ◽  
Author(s):  
Han Chen ◽  
Hao-Ran Liu ◽  
Xi-Yun Lu ◽  
Hang Ding

We numerically investigate the mechanism leading to the entrapment of spheres at the gas–liquid interface after impact. Upon impact onto a liquid pool, a hydrophobic sphere is seen to follow one of the three regimes identified in the experiment (Lee & Kim, Langmuir, vol. 24, 2008, pp. 142–145): sinking, bouncing or being entrapped at the interface. It is important to understand the role of wettability in this process of flow–structure interaction with dynamic wetting, and in particular, to what extent the wettability can determine whether the sphere is entrapped at the interface. For this purpose, a diffuse-interface immersed boundary method is adopted in the numerical simulations. We expand the parameter space considered previously, provide the phase diagrams and identify the key phenomena in the impact dynamics. Then, we propose the scaling models to interpret the critical conditions for the occurrence of sphere entrapment, accounting for the wettability of the sphere. The models are shown to provide a good correlation among the impact inertia of the drop, the surface tension, the wettability and the density ratio of the sphere to the liquid.


Fluids ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 20 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christina Hamlet ◽  
Wanda Strychalski ◽  
Laura Miller

Nematocysts are stinging organelles used by members of the phylum Cnidaria (e.g., jellyfish, anemones, hydrozoans) for a variety of important functions including capturing prey and defense. Nematocysts are the fastest-known accelerating structures in the animal world. The small scale (microns) coupled with rapid acceleration (in excess of 5 million g) present significant challenges in imaging that prevent detailed descriptions of their kinematics. The immersed boundary method was used to numerically simulate the dynamics of a barb-like structure accelerating a short distance across Reynolds numbers ranging from 0.9–900 towards a passive elastic target in two dimensions. Results indicate that acceleration followed by coasting at lower Reynolds numbers is not sufficient for a nematocyst to reach its target. The nematocyst’s barb-like projectile requires high accelerations in order to transition to the inertial regime and overcome the viscous damping effects normally encountered at small cellular scales. The longer the barb is in the inertial regime, the higher the final velocity of the projectile when it touches its target. We find the size of the target prey does not dramatically affect the barb’s approach for large enough values of the Reynolds number, however longer barbs are able to accelerate a larger amount of surrounding fluid, which in turn allows the barb to remain in the inertial regime for a longer period of time. Since the final velocity is proportional to the force available for piercing the membrane of the prey, high accelerations that allow the system to persist in the inertial regime have implications for the nematocyst’s ability to puncture surfaces such as cellular membranes or even crustacean cuticle.


2012 ◽  
Vol 140 (5) ◽  
pp. 1603-1619 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yu-Chieng Liou ◽  
Shao-Fan Chang ◽  
Juanzhen Sun

This study develops an extension of a variational-based multiple-Doppler radar synthesis method to construct the three-dimensional wind field over complex topography. The immersed boundary method (IBM) is implemented to take into account the influence imposed by a nonflat surface. The IBM has the merit of providing realistic topographic forcing without the need to change the Cartesian grid configuration into a terrain-following coordinate system. Both Dirichlet and Neumann boundary conditions for the wind fields can be incorporated. The wind fields above the terrain are obtained by variationally adjusting the solutions to satisfy a series of weak constraints, which include the multiple-radar radial velocity observations, anelastic continuity equation, vertical vorticity equation, background wind, and spatial smoothness terms. Experiments using model-simulated data reveal that the flow structures over complex orography can be successfully retrieved using radial velocity measurements from multiple Doppler radars. The primary advantages of the original synthesis method are still maintained, that is, the winds along and near the radar baseline are well retrieved, and the resulting three-dimensional flow fields can be used directly for vorticity budget diagnosis. If compared with the traditional wind synthesis algorithm, this method is able to merge data from different sources, and utilize data from any number of radars. This provides more flexibility in designing various scanning strategies, so that the atmosphere may be probed more efficiently using a multiple-radar network. This method is also tested using the radar data collected during the Southwest Monsoon Experiment (SoWMEX), which was conducted in Taiwan from May to June 2008 with reasonable results being obtained.


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