The Robustness of Seal Whisker Morphology in Suppressing Flow-induced Oscillations

Phocid seals are able to trace vibratile stimuli generated by prey fish in the ambient flow using only their whiskers. And the whiskers of most phocid seals exhibit wavy geometry along their spanwise directions, which is thought to be associated with the suppression of flow-induced oscillation (FIO). The current study uses computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations to investigate the relationship between seal whisker morphological properties and self-induced noises from FIO. We examine the lift force oscillation and flow structures of the whiskers in open steady flows over wide ranges of morphological and flow parameters. The preliminary results showed that the unique morphology of seal whisker generates stable three-dimensional vortex structures in the wake over the wide ranges of parameters which have important implication for the robustness of seal whisker morphology in suppressing FIO during swimming. The correlation between the morphological properties, vortex structures, and lift oscillations will be studied to uncover the underlying mechanism of the generation of vortex structures and suppression of FIO. Furthermore, the effect of the morphological properties on whisker-whisker interactions in a whisker array layout will be studied.