Computational Analysis of 3D Fin-Fin Interaction in Fish’s Steady Swimming

Three-dimensional numerical simulations are used to investigate the hydrodynamic performance and the wake patterns of a sunfish in steady swimming. Immersed boundary method for deformable attaching bodies (IBM-DAB) are used to handle complex moving boundaries of one solid body (fish body) attached with several membranes (fins). The effects of the vortices shed from both the dorsal and anal fins on the hydrodynamic performance of the caudal fin are analyzed by prescribing an undulatory swimming kinematics to a full body sunfish model. Results show that both the dorsal fin vortices and the anal fin vortices can increase the thrust and efficiency of the caudal fin comparing to caudal fin only case. This is because the dorsal/anal fin not only can feed vorticity into the caudal fin wake via vortex shedding, but also can modulate the flow in the downstream in a way of forming a jet with stronger backward component.