ESPCI web site
PMMH’s weekly seminar is held every Friday at 11 am (map)
Stéphane Perrard
Etienne Reyssat
Virgile Thiévenaz
PMMH
BARRE CASSAN
BAT A 1ER ETAGE CASE 18
7 QUAI SAINT BERNARD
75005 PARIS
France
Tel : (33) 1 40 79 45 22
Séminaire PMMH : Thomas Engels (LMD, ENS)
The impact of turbulence on flying insects in tethered and free flight : high-resolution numerical experiments
Flapping insects are remarkably agile fliers, adapted to a highly turbulent environment. We present a series of high resolution numerical simulations of a bumblebee interacting with fully developed turbulent inflow. We consider both tethered and free flight, the latter with all six degrees of freedom coupled to the Navier–Stokes equations. To this end we vary the characteristics of the turbulent inflow, either changing the turbulence intensity or the spectral distribution of turbulent kinetic energy. Active control is excluded in order to quantify the passive response real animals exhibit during their reaction time delay, before the wing beat can be adapted. Modifying the turbulence intensity shows no significant impact on the cycle-averaged aerodynamical forces, moments and power, compared to laminar inflow conditions. The fluctuations of aerodynamic observables, however, significantly grow with increasing turbulence intensity. Changing the integral scale of turbulent perturbations, while keeping the turbulence intensity fixed, shows that the fluctuation level of forces and moments is significantly reduced if the integral scale is smaller than the wing length. Additional simulations with laminar inflow, in which the insect's heading is not aligned with the mean flow, shed light on the role of the incident flow. This is relevant to understand the change of the insect's orientation due to turbulent perturbations. Our study shows that the scale-dependent energy distribution in the surrounding turbulent flow is a relevant factor conditioning how flying insects control their body orientation.
The audience is composed of people with rather heterogeneous backgrounds including specialists in solids, fluids, granular flows, statistical physics... so the idea is to keep your talk understandable by people not necessarily working in your field... The seminar time slot runs from 11am to noon so the best is to make the talk last around 45 minutes to leave some time for discussion.
- Séminaires ESPCI-ENS de biophysique
- Séminaires du Département de Physique de l’ENS
- Séminaires du Laboratoire d’Hydrodynamique de l’X
- Séminaire de Mécanique d’Orsay (page web FAST)
- Séminaire de Mécanique d’Orsay (page web LIMSI)
- Séminaire de Mécanique des Fluides de l’Institut Jean le Rond d’Alembert
- Séminaires du laboratoire MSC, Paris VII
- Séminaires Gulliver
Link to cofee seminar (internal, every Thursday)
