2019/08/09 by Jason G. Miles, Miles, Jason G., Nicholas Battista +1
Earth and Planetary Sciences · Engineering · #76Z10 #92B05 #92C10 #FOS: Biological sciences #FOS: Physical sciences #Fluid Dynamics (physics.flu-dyn) #Lattice Boltzmann Simulation Studies #Ocean Waves and Remote Sensing #Oceanographic and Atmospheric Processes #Quantitative Methods (q-bio.QM)
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1908.04202
openalex publication_date 2019/08/09 · openalex created_date 2022/07/28 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Jellyfish - majestic, energy efficient, and one of the oldest species that\ninhabits the oceans. It is perhaps the second item, their efficiency, that has\ncaptivated scientists for decades into investigating their locomotive behavior.\nYet, no one has specifically explored the role that their tentacles and oral\narms may have on their potential swimming performance, arguably the very\nfeatures that give jellyfish their beauty while instilling fear into their prey\n(and beach-goers). We perform comparative in silico experiments to study how\ntentacle/oral arm number, length, placement, and density affect forward\nswimming speeds, cost of transport, and fluid mixing. An open source\nimplementation of the immersed boundary method was used (IB2d) to solve the\nfully coupled fluid-structure interaction problem of an idealized flexible\njellyfish bell with poroelastic tentacles/oral arms in a viscous,\nincompressible fluid. Overall tentacles/oral arms inhibit forward swimming\nspeeds, by appearing to suppress vortex formation. Non-linear relationships\nbetween length and fluid scale (Reynolds Number) as well as tentacle/oral arm\nnumber, density, and placement are observed, illustrating that small changes in\nmorphology could result in significant decreases in swimming speeds, in some\ncases by downwards of 400% between cases with to without tentacles/oral arms.\n