David Laidlaw of CS, Kenny Breuer of Engineering, and Sharon Swartz of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology have just received a small collaborative NSF grant. The funding, together with a grant to workers at MIT, will be used develop a collaboration to use new methods to simulate more accurately how bat wings interact with air as the bats fly. The simulation will be designed to operate at multiple levels of physical approximation and computational speed, and will be capable of very rapid solutions while requiring input from measurements to ensure fidelity and optimality. It will be the first such system capable of generating timely solutions of complex flows over highly unsteady and deformable structures.
MIT participants are Jaime Peraire and Jacob White of the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics and Marc Drela of EECS.
