Manuel Garcia-Villalba

Fluid-Structure Interaction in Some Bioinspired Problem

In recent years there is a growing interest in developing aerial vehicles that mimic the flight of insects or birds and underwater vehicles that mimic the swimming of fish. However, the understanding of the underlying physical mechanisms is still limited. The motion of insects, birds or fish can be described as a fluid-structure interaction problem, in which one or more deformable bodies are immersed in a fluid. The dynamics of the bodies is a direct result of their hydrodynamic interaction with the surrounding fluid, which is driven by their deformation (active or passive). As a consequence, the resulting problem is a highly non-linear problem consisting of the coupling between the equations of the fluid motion and the equations of motion of the bodies. Moreover, these bodies are usually geometrically complex: they may have mobile appendages and/or they may be deformable and subject to large deformations. This geometrical variability/complexity poses additional problems when modelling this kind of problems, since the fluid-solid interface changes with time. In the talk we will discuss how numerical simulations can contribute to the progress in the field with examples from our recent work on the topic.