FURI | Spring 2025

Understanding Fish Propulsion Through Fluid Simulations

Past studies have explored fish swimming methods through fluid dynamics simulations. While an optimal range of non-dimensional swimming parameters under standard flow conditions for certain fish shapes is known, the design parameters for an anguilliform fish-like soft robot have not yet been extensively explored. In this project, a 2-dimensional swimming fish model is simulated under different Reynolds and Strouhal numbers for traveling and standing wave swimming modes using the Waterlily computational fluid dynamics solver in Julia. Unlike other studies, this work explores a wider Reynolds number range while modeling motion achievable with robotic actuators.