Flying snake wake visualizations

Vorticity field in the wake behind a snake cross-section at a Reynolds number of 2000 and 35-degrees angle of attack.

We are using the immersed boundary method to study the aerodynamics of flying snakes, in a collaboration with Jake Socha and Pavlos Vlachos at Virginia Tech.

We submitted the first paper on the aerodynamics of flying snakes in 2013, and we have prepared some animations of the vortical wake behind the anatomically correct snake-cross section to supplement the results presented in the paper. Follow the link below to the figshare repository where the video has been published (note that figshare objects have a permanent DOI, allowing you to cite this media).

• Watch a QuickTime movie of the wake visualizations (better image quality than the version in figshare)

The paper was submitted and the preprint is available on arXiv.

• "Lift and wakes of flying snakes", Anush Krishnan, John J. Socha, Pavlos V. Vlachos, L. A. Barba. Phys. Fluids, 26:031901 (2014). 10.1063/1.4866444 // Preprint arXiv:1309.2969 // figshare: body geometry // figshare: lift and drag coefficient curves //

Jake's TEDx talk at VTech

References

• "Flying snake wake visualizations with cuIBM", Anush Krishnan, L. A. Barba. (19 February 2013). 10.6084/m9.figshare.157334
  

  Video published on figshare under CC-BY.

• "Validation of the cuIBM code for Navier-Stokes equations with immersed boundary methods", Anush Krishnan, L. A. Barba. (6 July 2012). 10.6084/m9.figshare.92789 // Code repository
  

  Technical report published on figshare under CC-BY-NC.

• "Aerodynamics of flying snakes using an immersed boundary method", Anush Krishnan, L. A. Barba. 24th International Conference on Parallel Computational Fluid Dynamics, ParCFD’12 (21–25 May 2012).