Physical Review Fluids<\/a>\u00a0offer detailed insights into the hydrodynamic and aerodynamic interactions crucial in aerospace and automotive engineering, robotics, and energy harvesting.<\/p>\n\u201cOur findings offer a new way to understand how animal collectives coordinate movement and respond to their environment,\u201d says Christiana Mavroyiakoumou, a researcher at NYU\u2019s Courant Institute School of Mathematics, Computing, and Data Science at the time of the study and now a fellow at Oxford University\u2019s Mathematical Institute.<\/p>\n
\u201cMore specifically, lines of birds or fish behave like an elastic material with regularly spaced individuals held together by flexible, or spring-like, bonds\u2014akin to soft crystalline substances in which atoms are arranged in an orderly, repeating pattern.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cBecause these movements are similar to those that form the building blocks of materials, the work opens new avenues for analyzing\u2014and potentially manipulating\u2014how these components interact,\u201d adds Courant Professor Leif Ristroph, director of NYU\u2019s Applied Mathematics Laboratory, where the research was conducted.<\/p>\n
The laboratory previously uncovered how birds and fish move together without colliding and the underlying aerodynamics of these movements. However, the detailed nature of these orchestrated motions had been less clear.<\/p>\n
The research team, which also included Jiajie Wu, an NYU undergraduate at the time of the study, proposed a mathematical model to explain these movements\u2014one that was akin to those of soft crystalline materials, or soft crystals. These ordered solid materials can change their properties in response to stimuli, such as temperature or physical force, which make its atomic organization fragile. The researchers, then, saw a connection between crystalline organization and how birds or fish move together while adjusting their movements and formation in response to air or water flows, predators, or objects, such as rocks or buildings.<\/p>\n
\u201cCrystalline organization is inherently fragile as positions are susceptible to deformations and instabilities,\u201d explains Mavroyiakoumou.<\/p>\n
\u201cIn similar ways, birds and fish must sense and respond quickly to other forces in order to maintain long columnar formations. So while soft crystals, flocks of birds, and schools of fish are fragile in their makeup, such fragility may also be advantageous as it can be responsive to its surroundings.\u201d<\/p>\n
The study\u2019s authors considered previous experiments to determine if the model matched these experimental results. Among these was an experiment that mimicked the columnar formations of birds\u2014in which they line up one directly behind the other\u2014using mechanized flappers that act like birds\u2019 wings.<\/p>\n
The wings were 3D-printed from plastic and driven by motors to flap in water, which captured how air flows around bird wings during flight. This \u201cmock flock\u201d propelled through water at different speeds and could freely arrange itself within a line or queue.<\/p>\n
Overall, the flappers as a group behaved as the researchers had conceptualized\u2014one of several experiments that offered support for their proposed model.<\/p>\n
The research was supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation.<\/p>\n
Source: New York University<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Share this Article You are free to share this article under the Attribution 4.0 International license. New research…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":539648,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[15638,5939,61,60,82],"class_list":["post-539647","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-science","tag-birds","tag-fish","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/539647","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=539647"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/539647\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/539648"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=539647"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=539647"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=539647"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}