Bulletin of the American Physical Society
71st Annual Meeting of the APS Division of Fluid Dynamics
Volume 63, Number 13
Sunday–Tuesday, November 18–20, 2018; Atlanta, Georgia
Session L06: Forces, Flows, and Locomotion in Granular Media
4:05 PM–6:41 PM,
Monday, November 19, 2018
Georgia World Congress Center
Room: B208
Chair: Daniel Goldman, Georgia Institute of Technology
Abstract ID: BAPS.2018.DFD.L06.4
Abstract: L06.00004 : Mechanics of undulatory swimming on the surface of granular matter.*
4:44 PM–4:57 PM
Presenter:
Perrin E Schiebel
(Georgia Inst of Tech)
Authors:
Perrin E Schiebel
(Georgia Inst of Tech)
Jennifer M Rieser
(Georgia Inst of Tech)
Christian Hubicki
(Georgia Inst of Tech)
Alex M Hubbard
(Georgia Inst of Tech)
Henry C Astley
(Georgia Inst of Tech)
Kelimar Diaz Cruz
(Georgia Inst of Tech)
Daniel I Goldman
(Georgia Inst of Tech)
Elongate, limbless animals from the microscopic C. elegans to eels and snakes use flexural waves of the body to move. The swimming of such organisms immersed in homogeneous fluids is well-studied, but little is known about movement on deformable terrestrial materials. We used as a model system the sand-specialist snake C. occipitalis (~40 cm and 20 g) slithering quickly (body segment speeds of 30-100 cm/s) on the surface of homogeneous granular matter (GM). Surface drag measurements revealed that the ratio of thrust to drag forces, a critical component determining animal performance, was largely independent of drag distance, speed, or depth over an order of magnitude. As a result, resistive force theory (RFT) accurately predicted snake performance without accounting for the observed interface complexities like hysteresis. RFT revealed that the observed stereotyped waveform of the snake conferred maximum speed given a limit on peak muscle power. Our study suggests that surface sand slithering is analogous to low-Re swimming in a frictional fluid even at the highest observed speeds. Therefore, terrestrial “swimmers” may not need to contend with changing material dynamics as they increase speed.
*NSF PoLS, ARO, NDSEG, DARPA YFA
To cite this abstract, use the following reference: http://meetings.aps.org/link/BAPS.2018.DFD.L06.4
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