CFD-BASED SELF-PROPULSION SIMULATION FOR FROG SWIMMING

Abstract

Mechanism analysis of frog swimming is an interesting subject in the field of biofluid mechanics and bionics. Computing the hydrodynamic forces acting on a frog is difficult due to its characteristics of explosive propulsion and large range of joint motion. To analyze the flow around the body and vortices in the wake, in this paper, the method based on Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) was utilized to solve the velocity and pressure distributions in the flow field and on the frog. The hydrodynamic problem during the propulsive phase of a frog, Xenopus laevis, was calculated using the CFD software FLUENT. A self-propulsion simulation was performed which computed the body velocity from the joint trajectory input and CFD solved the hydrodynamic forces, and visual CFD results of the hydrodynamic forces and flow field structures were obtained.