Utilization of nonlinear vibrations of soft pipe conveying fluid for driving underwater bio-inspired robot

Creatures with longer bodies in nature like snakes and eels moving in water commonly generate a large swaying of their bodies or tails,with the purpose of producing significant frictions and collisions between body and fluid to provide the power of consecutive forward force.This swaying can be idealized by considering oscillations of a soft beam immersed in water when waves of vibration travel down at a constant speed.The present study employs a kind of large deformations induced by nonlinear vibrations of a soft pipe conveying fluid to design an underwater bio-inspired snake robot that consists of a rigid head and a soft tail.When the head is fixed,experiments show that a second mode vibration of the tail in water occurs as the internal flow velocity is beyond a critical value.Then the corresponding theoretical model based on the absolute nodal coordinate formulation(ANCF)is established to describe nonlinear vibrations of the tail.As the head is free,the theoretical modeling is combined with the computational fluid dynamics(CFD)analysis to construct a fluid-structure interaction(FSI)simulation model.The swimming speed and swaying shape of the snake robot are obtained through the FSI simulation model.They are in good agreement with experimental results.Most importantly,it is demonstrated that the propulsion speed can be improved by 21%for the robot with vibrations of the tail compared with that without oscillations in the pure jet mode.This research provides a new thought to design driving devices by using nonlinear flow-induced vibrations.

Extremely large-amplitude oscillation of soft pipes conveying fluid under gravity

In this work,the nonlinear behaviors of soft cantilevered pipes containing internal fluid flow are studied based on a geometrically exact model,with particular focus on the mechanism of large-amplitude oscillations of the pipe under gravity.Four key parameters,including the flow velocity,the mass ratio,the gravity parameter,and the inclination angle between the pipe length and the gravity direction,are considered to affect the static and dynamic behaviors of the soft pipe.The stability analyses show that,provided that the inclination angle is not equal to π,the soft pipe is stable at a low flow velocity and becomes unstable via flutter once the flow velocity is beyond a critical value.As the inclination angle is equal to π,the pipe experiences,in turn,buckling instability,regaining stability,and flutter instability with the increase in the flow velocity.Interestingly,the stability of the pipe can be either enhanced or weakened by varying the gravity parameter,mainly dependent on the value of the inclination angle.In the nonlinear dynamic analysis,it is demonstrated that the post-flutter amplitude of the soft pipe can be extremely large in the form of limit-cycle oscillations.Besides,the oscillating shapes for various inclination angles are provided to display interesting dynamical behaviors of the inclined soft pipe conveying fluid.