Experimental Investigations of Elastic Tail Propulsion At Low Reynolds Number

By Tony S. Yu, Eric Lauga, Anette Hosoi. 2006

200 citations recorded by the source corpus.

A simple way to generate propulsion at low Reynolds number is to periodically oscillate a passive flexible filament. Here we present a macroscopic experimental investigation of such a propulsive mechanism. A robotic swimmer is constructed and both tail shape and propulsive force are measured. Filament characteristics and actuation are varied, and the resulting data are quantitatively compared with existing linear and nonlinear theories.

Subfields: Aerospace Engineering, Computational Mechanics, Condensed Matter Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/8fe5198024ac46811f61350ef9e09a2f4cbcb0a3

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In Aerospace Engineering

In Computational Mechanics

In Condensed Matter Physics

Citations in the corpus

How Should Microrobots Swim? (2009, background): “Wall effects have also been observed to affect helical propulsion (Behkem and Sitti 2006), elastic-tail propulsion (Yu et al. 2006), and are generally important in low-Re swimming (Vogel 20031 Lauga and Powers 2009).”
Dynamics of filaments and membranes in a viscous fluid (2009, background): “Macroscopic scale experiments show that resistive force theory does surprisingly well in describing the shape of driven elastic filaments in highly viscous fluid (Koehler and Powers, 2000; Qian et al., 2008; Yu et al., 2006).”
Beneath Our Feet: Strategies for Locomotion in Granular Media (2015, background): “…et al. 2003, Jung et al. 2007, Lauga 2007, Liu et al. 2011, Qian et al. 2008, Raz & Avron 2008, Tam & Hosoi 2007, Wiggins & Goldstein 1998, Yang et al. 2009, Yu et al. 2006); other proposed designs such as the pushmepullyou (Avron et al. 2005) and the waving sheet (Taylor 1951) add to the taxonomy.”
The hydrodynamics of swimming microorganisms (2008, methodology): “In a macro-scale experiment, the forces arising from such elastic swimming were measured [143], and the actuation method was implemented successfully to obtain swimming [144, 297].”
Microrobots for minimally invasive medicine. (2010, background): “explore the propulsive force of an elastic tail being driven with a sinusoidal angle of φ = φ0 sin(ωt) with the position of the proximal end fixed (96).”