Aimy Wissa
Princeton University, NJ·Engineering
Flying fish do something no other animal can: they skim along the ocean surface with only the lower lobe of the tail fin dipping into the water, beating it to build up speed, then stretch a glide as far as 400 meters without splashing back down. That taxiing maneuver sits right at the boundary between two fluids, where the forces from water and air both act on the body at once, and the physics behind it is barely understood.
- Fields
Engineering
Biology
Physics
- Topics
flying fish
biomechanics
bioinspired design
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Aug 2028
What they work on
- Identify the anatomical features and force-generating mechanisms that let flying fish taxi with only the tail fin in the water, using a comparative biomechanics approach combined with field and laboratory measurements.
- Determine how unsteady water and air forces, including ground effect lift near the surface and fin flexibility, interact during takeoff at the water-air interface.
- Design a robotic model organism with flying-fish-like fins and body features, and use it as an experimental platform to test biological hypotheses about taxiing and to evaluate engineering designs.
- Develop multi-body dynamics models of the taxi-to-glide transition to derive the stability and control criteria needed for repeatable transitions and extended operation at the water surface.
More about the research
This project aims to uncover the mechanics that let an animal accelerate, lift off and stay stable at the water-air interface.
Why it matters
Vehicles that can reliably move between water and air would be useful for environmental monitoring and for sampling the narrow zone where ocean and atmosphere exchange heat and gases, a region important to weather and climate measurement. A model-based design framework drawn from flying fish mechanics could make such craft more repeatable and stable than current ad-hoc designs, while also explaining how a living animal achieves locomotion at this boundary.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Cecilia Huertas Cerdeira
University of Maryland, MD·Engineering·Early-career
Find optimal two-dimensional stiffness patterns for tuna-like caudal fins, for both forward propulsion and maneuvering, by combining soft robotic fins with hardware-in-the-loop optimization.
Samik Bhattacharya
University of Central Florida, FL·Engineering
Measure how rapid pitch-up motions of the wing and tail change lift and drag on 3D-printed bird models near the ground, using a force sensor to capture instantaneous forces during simulated takeoff and landing.
Robert Guy
University of California-Davis, CA·Mathematics & Statistics
Measure flow patterns and forces on dynamically similar remotely operated vehicles to test how metachronal rowing, a back-to-front wave of paddle strokes, generates thrust and lift across paddle Reynolds numbers from 0.01 to 10,000.
The school
Princeton University: 26 labs on PI Pages, $559M a year on research, 403 research doctorates a year.
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