Physical Review Journal Club: Fish Schools in a Vertical Diamond Formation: Effect of Vertical Spacing on Hydrodynamic Interactions
Thursday, June 26, 2025 at 11 a.m ET
Video Link
The Physical Review Journal Club returns June 26 with author Alec Menzer (University of Virginia), to discuss their recently published paper “Fish schools in a vertical diamond formation: Effect of vertical spacing on hydrodynamic interactions.” After the presentation, Menzer and co-authors will participate in a live Q&A session moderated by Physical Review Fluids Associate Editor Sunghwan “Sunny” Jung (Cornell University).
Registration is free and a video recording will be provided to all registrants.
Abstract
Alec Menzer and co-authors explore the potential of fish schooling to improve swimming efficiency, a topic that has attracted increasing attention, particularly for its applications in fish-inspired robotic systems. While most prior studies have focused on horizontal schooling formations, this work shifts the perspective to examine the hydrodynamics of fish swimming in vertically oriented diamond configurations.
Using an incompressible flow solver based on the immersed-boundary method, the authors simulate four fish with realistic body shapes positioned at the corners of a vertical diamond, with fish-like kinematics obtained from laboratory observations. Their results reveal that closer vertical spacing between the top and bottom fish leads to better performance enhancements across a range of Reynolds numbers. The mechanisms driving these enhancements are uncovered by analyzing in detail the vortex dynamics in the wake and its interaction with the fish’s bodies and fins and quantifying thrust enhancement and/or drag reduction for each individual fish. The results highlight a rich array of interactions within vertical diamond schools, including wake-body, wake-fin, fin-fin, and body-body interactions. These findings establish a solid foundation for evaluating performance in larger, vertically structured schools, and point toward promising directions for optimizing bio-inspired robotics.
Read ahead:
Fish schools in a vertical diamond formation: Effect of vertical spacing on hydrodynamic interactions
Alec Menzer, Yu Pan, George V. Lauder, Haibo Dong
Phys. Rev. Fluids 10, 043104
