On numerical modeling of animal swimming and flight

Hong Bin Deng, Yuan Qing Xu, Duan Duan Chen, Hu Dai, Jian Wu, Fang Bao Tian*

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

82 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

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.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)1221-1242
Number of pages22
JournalComputational Mechanics
Volume52
Issue number6
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - Dec 2013

Keywords

  • Body-conformal mesh method
  • Cartesian mesh method
  • Meshfree method
  • Numerical simulation
  • Overset-grid method
  • Swimming and flight

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