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Research Interests
My research interests are primarily situated in the realm of "biological fluids" -- particularly from a macro-scale and focused on animal propulsion. My work at Caltech will focus on propulsion in general, as a member of Prof. John Dabiri's group.Pulsed-Jet Propulsion
Squid and jellyfish use jets for propulsion, analogous to the modern propulsion systems powering submarines and boats, however, a significant difference is that squid and jellyfish create pulsed jets whereas boats and submarines use constant jets. This simple distinction has led our research to study the implementation of pulsed jets into engineered vehicles. Previous research in this area has suggested significant increases in efficiency are possible using pulsed jets. Our own research group has shown that by using pulsed jets, an aquatic vehicle can obtain the same speed using less power (up to 40% less) -- ultimately extending the vehicles range and endurance. This is a useful result for not only warships, but also for ocean monitoring, ocean-floor surveys, and mine detection. Current research in this area is investigating new mechanisms for producing the pulsed jet to further improve the efficiency.Wind Turbine Modeling
As fish swim, they shed vortices from their tail -- one vortex with each tail beat. Also, it is believed that schooling fish arrange themselves to take advantage of these shed vortices and thus minimize their energy output -- thus mutually benefiting each other. From a different perspective, we were interested in the idea of arranging vertical axis wind turbines in the same arrangement as that of the vortices shed from schooling fish -- with the aim to maximize energy output based on the mutually beneficial interactions between the neighboring vertical axis wind turbines. Our model suggests significant increases in the power density (the energy output per area of land) of over an order of magnitude (more than 10x) existing wind farm technologies. This continues to be an area of research for us and we are interested to see what future work will tell us about this phenomenon.last updated august 10th, 2011
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