The unsteady aspect of flapping foil locomotion depicted in Fig.
3 raises an intriguing question, namely, why do fish swim so
elegantly, meaning without jerkiness, although that is what one
would expect from Fig. 3? In this paper, we have also examined a
hypothesis, namely, is the head oscillation of a fish during swimming
also a propulsive mechanism that has a phased relationship
with the tail flapping, the net result being an uniform axial force
leading to the jerk-free motion? Simply put, this paper examines
these two unsteady locomotive aspects of a fish, namely, the flapping
of its tail and the oscillations of its head, in the context of a
rigid body which removes the apparent complication of the effects
of a flexible body.
1.6 Interaction of Main Body Length and Flapping Foil
Frequency. While the theoretical inviscid-flow efficiency of a
two-dimensional flapping foil is 100 percent, the efficiency of a
finite span flapping foil attached to a body would be lower, and
conceivably significantly lower. ~Efficiency, to be defined later, is
given by the ratio of output power of the flapping foils to the
power input to the actuators.! How a finite body interacts with a
finite flapping foil is an important question. Yet, not much is
known about this interaction. Efficiency is generally difficult to
measure accurately in aquatic animals. However, evidence is presented
below showing that the main body length is related to the
flapping foil mechanism in a dolphin. This is considered below
where dolphin swimming is modeled as a pendulum.
1.6.1 A Pendulum Model of Dolphin Swimming. The tail
beat mode of dolphin swimming is considered. It is hypothesized
that the tail beat frequency is related to the length of the dolphin
and the zeroth order swimming is modeled as a simple pendulum.
Available measurements of tail beat frequency are found to be
consistent with the model. It is shown that natural frequency varies
inversely with the square root of length, while the rate of
change of tail beat frequency with speed is universal.
1.6.1.1 Introduction: As mentioned earlier, in a bid to learn
from nature and apply to engineering, recently, the gap in maneuvering
between fast yet agile species of fish like mackerel and
bluefish and small underwater bodies, has been quantified ~Bandyopadhyay
et al. @1#!. The maneuvering ability is expressed as a
relationship between normal acceleration, nondimensionalized by
g(cg), and turning radius r/L, where r is turning radius and L is
fish or vehicle length. A departure from inverse power relationship
is observed at lower values of r/L. However, a more consistent
trend is observed when speed U is expressed as body lengths
traveled per second (U/L). As considered below, this intriguing
appearance of L is observed in dolphin swimming also. No satisfactory
explanation is available. Biological data sets tend to have
large scatter and mechanistic theories are generally few, but may
be worth developing to extract trends hidden in the apparent scatter.
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