Fish are thought to adjust their tail stiffness to swim efficiently over a wide range of speeds, but how they tune stiffness has been a mystery. We derived a model that combines fluid …
Because of their small size and agility, quadrotors could revolutionize search-and-rescue or terrain-mapping missions. However, to do so, they have to operate in confined spaces such as rubble corridors or …
Pilots need complex instruments and training to safely fly through gusts when their vision is deprived. In contrast, birds fly reliably over open water and at night, despite being more …
Micro Aerial Vehicles (MAVs) have the potential to revolutionize search-and-rescue, product delivery, aerial mapping, and weather sensing. Current models for how MAVs interact with solid boundaries are based on helicopters, …
Building on our previous work on 2-D pitching airfoils, we explored how forces and torques scale for 3-D pitching airfoils. The terms we added to existing theories were inspired by …
We used a zero-finding algorithm to tune the turbulence intensity downstream of a grid of spinning vanes in a wind tunnel. We then explored how the algorithm was affected by …
A traditional “glass harp” is an array of wine glasses filled to various depths. We discovered that a single empty wine glass submerged in a bath of water can also …
Simplified geometries can be used to isolate the effects of flexibility in swimming fish. Here we used an oscillating flexible rectangular panel to explore how efficiency is affected by frequency, …
We extended our work on rigid airfoils and discovered that flexible panels also produce more thrust near a solid boundary. This time, we checked swimming speed directly and confirmed that …
Simplified geometries can be used to isolate the effects of flexibility in swimming fish. Here we used an oscillating flexible rectangular panel to explore how efficiency scales with panel stiffness …
In Atomic Force Microscopy (AFM), tiny forces on a probe are used to map the fine-scale structure of a surface. We re-derived the forces on AFM probes for the special …