Study on Mechanical Characteristics of Biological Composite Material in Dolphin Tail Flukes
Dolphins show extraordinary speed in their swimming,the speed of bottlenose dolphin (Tursiops truncatus) even can reach 8.2-11.1m/s.The dolphinstail flukes have been considered to play an important role in their high speed swimming.They propel themselves forward by pitching their semilunate tail fins.There is no bones and muscles in the tail flukes.We found that the tail fin is composed of a cutaneous layer,a subcutaneous blubber lay,a ligamentous layer and a core of dense fibrous tissue in which the fibers are approximately at right angles to the fibers in the ligamentous layer,such a complicated construction exhibits many similarities to a composite material.In this paper,we investigated the tensile strength of the fibers aggregation in the ligamentous layer and the core tissue by the tensile test.We investigated the flexural rigidity of the tail fin,and then obtained the Young’s modulus of the fin by calculation.The research will help us to develop an underwater propulsor using an oscillating fin like dolphin tail flukes.
Dolphin Tail fluke Flexural rigidity Young’s modulus Tensile test
Qilong Sun Hirohisa Morikawa Tetsuya Yoshiike Shunichi Kobayashi
Faculty of Textile Science & Technology,Shinshu University 3-15-1,Tokida,Ueda City,Nagano Prefecture,Japan
国际会议
杭州
英文
2008-10-15（万方平台首次上网日期，不代表论文的发表时间）