Aquatic and aerial animals have developed their superior and complete mechanisms of swimming and flight. These mechanisms bring excellent locomotion performances to natural creatures, including high efficiency, long endurance ability, high maneuverability and low noise, and can potentially provide inspiration for the design of the man-made vehicles. As an efficient research approach, numerical modeling becomes more and more important in studying the mechanisms of swimming and flight. This review is focused on assessing the recent progress in numerical techniques of solving animal swimming and flight problems. According to the complexity of the problems considered, numerical studies are classified into five stages, of which the main characteristics and the numerical strategies are described and discussed. In addition, the body-conformal mesh, Cartesian-mesh, overset-grid, and meshfree methods are briefly introduced. Finally, several open issues in numerical modeling in this field are highlighted.

On numerical modeling of animal swimming and flight

Geometric meshes used in the finite-element method and related techniques must meet three requirements: they must model geometric shapes adequately; they must respect physical phenomena of importance in the problem (for example crack singularities); and they must provide high local accuracy in regions of particular importance. Only simplex elements can be guaranteed to model geometry correctly if used with fully automatic mesh generators. Only adaptive mesh refinement can model in accordance with the characteristics of the physical solution. Technical specifications requiring high local accuracy can be accommodated in automatic mesh generation by permitting the user to specify a locally varying accuracy index.

D Shenton

Papers

Adaptive finite element mesh generation using the Delaunay algorithm