Computational study on upward force generation of gymnotiform undulating fin

Abstract

Gymnotiform is a type of fish swimming which uses only a long anal fin as the main propeller. In the real gymnotiform fish, the fin undulates with the counter-propagating motion for the movement of upward and downward while the body still rigid. There are some studies about this type of motion which apply the experiment and the digital particle image velocimetry (DPIV) method. In the robotics field, computational fluid dynamics (CFD) is extremely outstanding with the accuracy, fast and thorough display the impact of fluid on objects. This paper proposes a model of CFD to determine about 2 types of counter-propagating motion.