Leftwich Lab news, hot off the press
Congratulations to Dr. Colin Parker
Colin successfully defended his dissertation "An Investigation into the Aerodynamics Surrounding
Vertical-Axis Wind Turbines" on Friday December 8. Congrats to the newly minted Dr. Parker. The Leftwich Lab will miss you!
Colin's new EIF paper
Colin's paper on dynamics solidity of VAWTs is out in Experiments in Fluid. Thanks to collaborator and coauthor Daniel Araya.
Parker, C. M., Araya, D. B., & Leftwich, M. C. (2017). Effect of chord-to-diameter ratio on vertical-axis wind turbine wake development. Experiments in Fluids, 58(12), 168, doi.org/10.1007/s00348-017-2451-6
Aditya and Rahi's JoVE paper is out
We have a new protocol in the Journal of Visualized Experiments. The video is great!
Kulkarni, A., Patel, R., Friedman, C. and Leftwich, M.C. (2017) “A robotic platform to study foreflip- per of the California sea lion” Journal of Visualized Experiments (119), e54909, doi:10.3791/54909
Megan's YIP proposal is funded
The proposal is titles Sea Lion Swimming: A Model for Efficient, Hydrodynamically Quiet Propulsion. Thanks to the Office of Naval Research for supporting our work and allowing us to continue this great project. Check out the complete list of 2017 ONR YIP recipients.
Two Leftwich Lab papers in PRF
The first is an exploration into the input function for flexible heaving panels. The result os a great collaboration with the Lauder Lab at Harvard (it's also one of my favorite papers ever):
Lehn, A., Thornycroft, P.J.M, Lauder, G.V. and Leftwich, M.C. (2017) “The effect of input perturbation on the performance and wake dynamics of aquatic propulsion in heaving flexible foils” Physical Review Fluids 2(2), 023101, doi:10.1103/PhysRevFluids.2.023101
The other is a long-time-coming collaboration with Eric Tytell (Tufts University) and others that is the last of my PhD data!
Tytell, E.D., Leftwich, M.C., Hsu, C.Y., Griffith, B.E., Cohen, A.H, Smits, A.J., Hamlet, C. and Fauci, L. (2016) “The role of body stiffness in undulatory swimming: insights from robotic and compu- tational models” Physical Review Fluids 1(7), 073202, doi:10.1103/PhysRevFluids.1.073202
WIRED article
Our work on sea lion swimming was featured in an article and video in WIRED online. Check is out here.
NYT summer of science
The NY Times has a great, visually driven series this year called the Summer os science. The excellent Nicholas St. Fleur wrote a great piece on our Sea lion work. It’s a nice short explanation of what we do at the National Zoo.
Smithsonian Magazine video!
Check out this great video on our work with the California sea lions at the National Zoo in Smithsonian Magazine. It was made by the very talents Sarah Joseph and Jon Betz. Thanks so much to everyone at Smithsonian Magazine for capturing our lab so well!
Two new Leftwich Lab papers out this summer
The first describes the geometry of the California sea lion foreflipper:
Friedman, C., Joel, B. W., Schult, A. R., & Leftwich, M. C. (2015). Noninvasive 3D geometry extraction of a Sea lion foreflipper. Journal of Aero Aqua Bio-mechanisms, 4(1), 25-31. http://doi.org/10.5226/jabmech.4.25
And, the second is on the vertical shock tube at Los Alamos:
Mejia-Alvarez, R., Wilson, B., Leftwich, M. C., Martinez, A. A., & Prestridge, K. P. (2015). Design of a fast diaphragmless shock tube driver. Shock Waves, 1-16. doi: 10.1007/s00193-015-0579-y