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Effects of pectoral fins' spanwise flexibility on forward thrust generation

conference contribution
posted on 2017-01-01, 00:00 authored by Soheil Arastehfar, Gunawan, Khoon Seng Yeo, Chee-Meng Chew
Pectoral fins of manta rays have been a great source of inspiration for propulsive mechanism of underwater vehicles in the last decade. In the existing literature, effects of the chordwise flexibility of these fins on the forward thrust generation has been widely studied, while the study on the spanwise flexibility is considerably lacking. In this paper, we aim to investigate the effects of the fins' spanwise flexibility (quantified by bending stiffness) on the forward thrust generation. An experiment was conducted in a water channel to measure the forward thrust generated by 16 fins under free stream condition (0.5 m/s). The fins' bending stiffness ranged from 0.018 N/mm to 0.499 N/mm. All the fins had the same span length and surface area in order to preserve the hydrodynamic integrity of the experiment. The experimental results showed that for the range of the spanwise flexibility considered in this study, the forward thrust generation increases by decreasing the fins' spanwise flexibility until a certain bending stiffness value. After that the rate of the change in the thrust generation becomes very minor, indicating a plateau region.

History

Pagination

110-115

Location

Macau, China

Start date

2017-12-05

End date

2017-12-08

ISBN-13

9781538637425

Language

eng

Publication classification

E Conference publication, E1.1 Full written paper - refereed

Copyright notice

2017, IEEE

Title of proceedings

ROBIO 2017 : Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Biomimetics

Event

Robotics and Biomimetics. IEEE International Conference (2017 : Macau, China)

Publisher

IEEE

Place of publication

Piscataway, N.J.