Bio-Inspired Fluid Flows and Fluid Mechanics

Dear Colleagues,

Natural flyers and swimmers can accomplish highly agile maneuvers and thus serve as perfect archetypes for designing micro air vehicles and unmanned underwater vehicles. Their excellent performance is strongly supported by the interaction between their wings/fins and the fluids in the vicinity of their body motions; therefore, the development of such bio-inspired vehicles requires a thorough understanding of these bio-inspired fluid flows. The underlying aerodynamic/hydrodynamic mechanisms involve highly unsteady and strong vortical features, as well as fluid–structure interaction. These fundamental fluid physics have been extensively researched over the past two decades, but there remain some interesting areas in need of further study, such as complex wing/fin–wake interaction, wing/fin morphing, collective bio-locomotion, intricate maneuvers when facing an obstacle or being chased by a predator, noise production and reduction in the fluids, etc. Moreover, these aerodynamic/hydrodynamic mechanisms should be quantified and modeled, making them more easily applied to practical designs. Recently, the rapid growth of machine learning tools has provided more efficient solutions to model high-dimensional, nonlinear, and unsteady physics, such as vortical flow reconstruction, motion optimization, control design, etc. Thus, the scientific community must continue to extend these cutting-edge research fields and propose both novel explanations and useful design tools.

This Special Issue is dedicated to exploring the aerodynamics/hydrodynamics of bio-inspired fluid flows, as well as those related to bio-inspired micro air vehicles and unmanned underwater vehicles. Relevant aspects including fluid–structure interaction, neural–muscular–fluid coupling, flow sensing/control, etc., are also welcome.

Dr. Long Chen
Dr. Linlin Kang
Guest Editors

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• aerodynamics of flying animals
• hydrodynamics of swimming animals
• fluids of bio-inspired micro air vehicles and unmanned underwater vehicles
• application of machine learning to bio-inspired fluids
• fluid–structure interaction/fluid-structure-sound interactions in biological contexts
• numerical modeling/experimental techniques for bio-inspired fluid mechanics
• integrated research on neural, muscular, and fluid coupling
• flow sensing and control inspired by nature