Novel Underwater Bionic Propulsion System Using Magnetroheological Elastromer

Abstract

Aquatic animals, which are the result of many millions of years of evolutionary optimization, are very quick, efficient, robust, and versatile. Accordingly, biologically-inspired mechanisms which emulate the movement of animals have recently become very popular. It is important to analyze the fluid flow in detail to make an efficient design of a propulsion system. CFD (Computational Fluid Dynamics) has become a powerful technique to understand the phenomena because it gives extensive information about the fluid flow characteristics. In the present work, a propulsion system consisting of a flapping fin which emulates the fish tail was built. In order to optimize the mechanism, several flapping configurations were studied using a 3D CFD model. The force, thrust and hydrodynamic characteristics were analyzed. Furthermore, it was shown that the efficiency and thrust depend strongly on the oscillation frequency and amplitude. In order to validate this CFD model, the numerically obtained thrust was successfully compared with experimental results from a journal. From the result we can conclude that the thrust increases both with the increase of the frequency and amplitude.