Energetics of optimal undulatory swimming organisms

Optimal shape and motion of undulatory swimming organisms.

Undulatory swimming animals exhibit diverse ranges of body shapes and motion patterns and are often considered as having superior locomotory performance. The extent to which morphological traits of swimming animals have evolved owing to primarily locomotion considerations is, however, not clear. To shed some light on that question, we present here the optimal shape and motion of undulatory swim...

Optimal swimming of flagellated micro-organisms

This paper studies flagellar undulations that propel a micro-organism at a given speed while minimizing its expenditure of hydrodynamical energy. The study is in two basic parts. The first part is a qualitative inquiry into the general nature of undulations that are hydrodynamically optimal in the instantaneous sense. The results indicate that an apparent sliding of the entire flagellum along i...

Undulatory and Flagellar Swimming

SYNOPSIS. We present a mathematical model and numerical method designed to study the fluid dynamics of swimming organisms. The full Navier-Stokes equations are solved in a domain of fluid within which an organism undergoing time-dependent motions is immersed. Of interest are both the dynamics of a single organism and the relationship of its morphology to its motility properties, as well as the ...

Undulatory swimming in viscoelastic fluids.

The effects of fluid elasticity on the swimming behavior of the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans are experimentally investigated by tracking the nematode's motion and measuring the corresponding velocity fields. We find that fluid elasticity hinders self-propulsion. Compared to Newtonian solutions, fluid elasticity leads to up to 35% slower propulsion. Furthermore, self-propulsion decreases as e...

Undulatory Swimming vs Propeller Based Semester Project