Hydrodynamic Performance of Aquatic Flapping: Efficiency of Underwater Flight in the Manta

By Frank E. Fish, Christian Schreiber, Keith W. Moored, Geng Liu, Haibo Dong, Hilary Bart-Smith. 2016

191 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The manta is the largest marine organism to swim by dorsoventral oscillation (flapping) of the pectoral fins. The manta has been considered to swim with a high efficiency stroke, but this assertion has not been previously examined. The oscillatory swimming strokes of the manta were examined by detailing the kinematics of the pectoral fin movements swimming over a range of speeds and by analyzing simulations based on computational fluid dynamic potential flow and viscous models. These analyses showed that the fin movements are asymmetrical up- and downstrokes with both spanwise and chordwise waves interposed into the flapping motions. These motions produce complex three-dimensional flow patterns. The net thrust for propulsion was produced from the distal half of the fins. The vortex flow pattern and high propulsive efficiency of 89% were associated with Strouhal numbers within the optimal range (0.2–0.4) for rays swimming at routine and high speeds. Analysis of the swimming pattern of the manta provided a baseline for creation of a bio-inspired underwater vehicle, MantaBot.

Subfields: Aerospace Engineering, Nature and Landscape Conservation, Ocean Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/99116aa5289c6deb3099189a3ebca62ae5333da3

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In Aerospace Engineering

In Nature and Landscape Conservation

In Ocean Engineering

Citations in the corpus

Computational analysis of vortex dynamics and performance enhancement due to body–fin and fin–fin interactions in fish-like locomotion (2017, methodology): “The method used to reconstruct the Crevalle Jack body-fin kinematics is the same as that used by Fish et al. (2016) and Liu et al. (2015), and is developed from the method employed by Koehler et al. (2012) for tracking the kinematics of insect flight. For completeness, we briefly summarize it as fol”
Undulatory and oscillatory swimming (2019, background): “…a different propulsive mechanism, in that they use their greatly enlarged pectoral fins to propel themselves, and can display either undulatory or oscillatory swimming behaviours, called rajiform and mobuliform, respectively (Rosenberger & Westneat 1999; Rosenberger 2001; Fish et al. 2016, 2017).”