69th Annual Meeting of the APS Division of Fluid Dynamics (November 20, 2016 — November 22, 2016)

V0106: Slamming and Slapping: the story of a diving wedge

Authors
  • Daniel Yohann, University of Southern California
  • Tingben Xiao, University of Southern California
  • Lionel Vincent, University of Southern California
  • Eva Kanso, University of Southern California
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/APS.DFD.2016.GFM.V0106

Birds such as cape gannets exhibit a remarkable fishing strategy: they dive head-first in the water. Before hitting the water, they streamline their body shape to minimize impact force. To better understand the force generation during impact, we study the different aspects of the water entry of a two-dimensional wedge. We focus specifically on the time-dependent impact force during entry (e.g., the existence of a maximum before total immersion of a wedge), but also on the the shape(s) of the splash, which proved to be strongly influenced by aerodynamics.

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. Any reuse must credit the author(s) and provide a link back to this page.