On numerical modeling of animal swimming and flight

Aquatic and aerial animals have developed their superior and complete mechanisms of swimming and flight. These mechanisms bring excellent locomotion performances to natural creatures, including high efficiency, long endurance ability, high maneuverability and low noise, and can potentially provide inspiration for the design of the man-made vehicles. As an efficient research approach, numerical modeling becomes more and more important in studying the mechanisms of swimming and flight. This review is focused on assessing the recent progress in numerical techniques of solving animal swimming and flight problems. According to the complexity of the problems considered, numerical studies are classified into five stages, of which the main characteristics and the numerical strategies are described and discussed. In addition, the body-conformal mesh, Cartesian-mesh, overset-grid, and meshfree methods are briefly introduced. Finally, several open issues in numerical modeling in this field are highlighted.