Margaret Byron
Penn State Universtiy
Seminar Information
Throughout most of human history, engineered devices have been primarily made of rigid components—but living organisms tend to use flexible, deformable structures for key behaviors like locomotion, sensing, and feeding. In the context of swimming, flexible structures are two-way coupled to the surrounding flow, and their deformation in response to fluid forcing is critical for evaluating hydrodynamic performance. This coupling is particularly complex in the intermediate Reynolds number regime, where viscous and inertial forces are both important for force generation.Little is known about how flexible biopropulsors create and control flow in this physical context, despite numerous swimming strategies developed by organisms that occupy these scales. Using a combination of live animal experiments and soft-robotic testbeds, we explore the hydrodynamic interactions between single and metachronally coordinated flexible propulsors, inspired by the swimming of ctenophores (comb jellies). We use high speed videography and flow visualization to measure and describe the vortex dynamics enabled by tuning the highly multivariate parameter space of propulsor spacing, kinematics, and coordination. Our results will help develop the next generation of bioinspired vehicles, devices, and robots for underwater exploration and discovery.
Dr. Margaret L. Byron is currently the Martin W. Trethewey Early Career Professor in Mechanical Engineering at Penn State University, and is a recipient of the NSF CAREER Award, the Beckman Young Investigator Award, and the American Chemical Society Doctoral New Investigator Award. She earned her B.S. in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering from Princeton University in 2010 and her MS/PhD in Civil and Environmental Engineering from the University of California Berkeley in 2012/2015. She works at the interface of biology, physics, and engineering, with interests including the fluid dynamics of animal locomotion and the transport of irregularly shaped inertial particles in turbulent flows (including sediment, aggregates, and microplastics).