A Review on Fish Swimming and Bird/Insect Flight
Theodore Yaotsu Wu (Engineering, Applied Science, California, Institute of Technology)

TL;DR
This review comprehensively covers the fluid dynamics, biomechanics, and energetics of fish swimming, bird flight, and insect flight, highlighting recent advances, theoretical models, and biological principles underlying animal locomotion.
Contribution
It synthesizes recent theoretical, experimental, and computational studies across aquatic and aerial animal locomotion, providing new insights into energy conservation and propulsion mechanisms.
Findings
Hydrodynamic viscous drag on fish is mainly due to laminar boundary layers.
Nonlinear theories improve understanding of large-amplitude propulsion.
Unsteady aerodynamics explain high lift in insect flight.
Abstract
This expository review is devoted to fish swimming and bird/insect flight. (i) The simple waving motion of an elongated flexible ribbon plate of constant width, immersed in a fluid at rest, propagating a wave distally down the plate to swim forward is first considered to provide a fundamental concept on energy conservation. It is generalized to include variations in body width and thickness, vortex shedding from appended dorsal, ventral and caudal fins to closely simulate fish swimming for which a nonlinear theory is presented for large-amplitude propulsion. (ii) For bird flight, the pioneering studies on oscillating rigid wings are briefed, followed by presenting a nonlinear unsteady theory for flexible wing with arbitrary variations in shape and trajectory with a comparative study with experiments. (iii) For insect flight, more recent advances are reviewed under aerodynamic theory and…
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Taxonomy
TopicsBiomimetic flight and propulsion mechanisms · Fish Ecology and Management Studies · Aerospace Engineering and Energy Systems
