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Science of Swimming and the Swimming of the Soft Shelled Turtle

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 January 2014

Shinichiro Ito
Shinichiro Ito*
Affiliation:
Department of Mechanical Engineering, Kogakuin University, 1-24-2 Nishi-Shinjuku, Shinjuku-ku, Tokyo, 1680065, Japan
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Abstract

Swimming is dynamically a part of the hydrodynamic field and can be considered as a field of the optimal control motion. Animals move by instinct according to the situation which they are confronting with. Therefore, their instinctive motion is optimal most of the time. The movement of animals can be classified roughly into two kinds: the fast motion with the maximum speed and the motion with the minimum energy consumption. Considering the foreleg of the soft shelled turtle as a flat plane, several sets of movement of the foreleg were observed and calculated theoretically. The theoretical results agreed the observation results in the both cases with the maximum speed and the minimum energy consumption. Applying the theoretical movement of the soft shelled turtle foreleg to human movement in swimming, the general S-shaped pull stroke is the minimum energy consumption motion in free-style. It became clear that there was a different stroke for generating the maximum speed in free-style. That was the soft shelled turtle style of fast swimming, the I-shaped pull strokes. In 2002 when the author announced this theory, there was only one fast swimmer whose free-style swimming strokes coincidentally accorded with the I-shaped pull with fewer numbers of strokes at that time. He was the Olympic gold medalist Ian Thorp. Now the I-shaped stoke has become main stream in free style.

Keywords

biomimetic (assembly)biologicalfluid
Type
Articles
Information
MRS Online Proceedings Library (OPL) , Volume 1621: Symposium H/C/D/J – Advances in Structures, Properties and Applications of Biological and Bioinspired Materials , 2014 , pp. 221 - 227
Copyright
Copyright © Materials Research Society 2014 

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References

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