Flying and swimming animals cruise at a Strouhal number tuned for high power efficiency

By Graham K. Taylor, R. Nudds, Adrian L. R. Thomas. Nature, 2003

1,019 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Subfields: Aerospace Engineering, Nature and Landscape Conservation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/822d516c2756d425310772031e73cbf5596a324b

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In Aerospace Engineering

In Nature and Landscape Conservation

Citations in the corpus

A model for the symmetry breaking of the reverse Bénard–von Kármán vortex street produced by a flapping foil (2008, background): “Flapping-based propulsive systems, either natural or man-made, are often discussed in terms of the Strouhal number, defined as the product of the flapping frequency f and amplitude A divided by the cruising speed U0 ,i .e.StA = fA /U0 (Anderson et al. 1998; Taylor, Nudds & Thomas 2003 ).”
Tuna robotics: A high-frequency experimental platform exploring the performance space of swimming fishes (2019, background): “4, which is close to the upper bound of optimality for flying and swimming animals (66).”
Hydrodynamics of Undulatory Propulsion (2005, background): “Fishes, marine mammals, and even flying animals seem to flap with a Strouhal number near 0.3 (Triantafyllou et al., 1993; Taylor et al., 2003; Rohr and Fish, 2004), although values from close to 0 to near 1 have been reported (Horton, et al., 2003; Rohr and Fish, 2004).”
Time-resolved reconstruction of the full velocity field around a dynamically-scaled flapping wing (2006, background): “This number compares a typical time scale of the fluid dynamics with a time scale describing some kind of internal or external cycle (Taylor et al. 2003).”
Three-dimensional simulation of a flapping flag in a uniform flow (2010, background): “2 (Taylor et al. 2003), which is within the range of the present results.”
Review of experimental work in biomimetic foils (2004, background): “quencies close to those for optimal efficiency [120], [26], [50], [68], [101], [86], [145], [146], [154], [156].”
Unsteady force generation and vortex dynamics of pitching and plunging aerofoils (2012, positive): “The St range for optimum propulsive efficiency reported by Triantafyllou and co-workers is supported by data on birds, bats and insects at forward flight conditions [78].”
On the rules for aquatic locomotion (2017, neutral): “4 coincident with fish and cetaceans [4].”