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Looking to Nature for Engineering Insights: Sea Lions May Inspire 'Strokes' of Genius
Megan Leftwich and her students at George Washington University are conducting a comprehensive field study on the high-performance swimming of sea lions. With support from the National Science Foundation, the mechanical engineer aims to describe, mathematically, the unique style of these agile swimmers.
Using data on sea lions at the Smithsonian National Zoo, they design and test robotic flippers in the lab to better understand the flow of water around the animals’ flippers. The team's discoveries in fluid dynamics could ultimately help engineers of the future improve propulsion for all sorts of submerged objects, from ships to underwater drones.
As Leftwich explains, “The idea is not to replicate the sea lion. It’s to understand the sea lion and be inspired by that—by the physics that make the sea lion work.”