Stanley Corrsin Award Lecture II: From Beating Hearts to Flapping Fins: Insights into Biological Flows Empowered by High-Fidelity Immersed Boundary Methods

The continuous growth in computing power coupled with new computational algorithms and data-enabled methods is opening up exciting areas for research and discovery at the intersection of fluid dynamics and biology. Consider the mammalian heart, which has been sculpted by millions of years of evolution into a flow pump par excellence. During the typical lifetime of a human, the heart will beat over three billion times and pump enough blood to fill sixty Olympic-sized swimming pools. Each of these billions of cardiac cycles is itself a manifestation of a complex and elegant interplay between several distinct physical domains including hemodynamics, electrophysiology, muscle mechanics, flow-induced valves dynamics, acoustics, and biochemistry. In the arena of biolocomotion, fish are known to employ their highly flexible bodies and fins to extract energy from vortices and propel themselves in water with grace and efficiency that is the envy of all engineers. The buzzing of mosquitoes might be annoying to us, but the lifecycle of these insects is intimately tied to the generation of aeroacoustic wing-tones in ways that we do not yet understand. Previous investigations of such problems were often limited by the tools at hand, but modern computational tools are enabling the exploration of such multi-physics problems with a level of fidelity and precision that is unprecedented. In my talk, I will describe how the power of high-fidelity sharp-interface immersed boundary methods has enabled us to attack problems ranging from the chemo-fluidics of clot formation in the heart and aeroacoustic sound generation by flying insects, to the hydrodynamic mechanisms that schooling fish may exploit to increase thrust and efficiency.