Back to Departmental Colloquium: Fall 2004
Departmental Colloquium
Date: Thursday, Nov 18, 2004
Time: 4:15PM
Location: JWB 335
Departmental Colloquium
Locomotion by Destabilizing Symmetries
Title |
Locomotion by Destabilizing Symmetries |
Abstract |
Recent experiments in the Courant Institute Applied Math Lab have shown fascinating and subtle interactions between fluids and bodies moving through them, and have suggested that fluidic response to body motions can change dramatically with the “forcing Reynolds number,” and can result in body locomotion. In joint work with S. Alben, I will discuss the rich dynamics possible from an oscillated simple body that interacts with a surrounding viscous fluid. We show that nontrivial dynamics results from a classical symmetry breaking instability of body/flow interaction, yielding new periodic, quasi-periodic, and apparently chaotic dynamical states. We show further that in broad parameter regimes, unidirectional coherent locomotion of the body emerges as an attracting state of the system. |
Dynamical Systems