Muscle-driven movement of fully elastic pulsing corals

Corals in the Xeniidae family are sessile organisms that actively pulse their tentacles. The pulsing behavior is unusual since it is not for locomotive purposes. Using computational fluid dynamics, we seek to understand this behavior and the resulting flow. Previous work has made modeling simplifications, including modeling the coral in two dimensions, assuming the tentacle as infinitely thin, and prescribing the tentacle motion. In this work, the immersed boundary finite element method (IBFE), a part of the open-source software IBAMR is used to model a fully three-dimensional coral. Active tension will be applied to the tentacles as a simplified muscle model rather than a prescribed motion. This approach could allow for observing emergent properties of the interaction between the coral motion and fluid flow that would not be present with prescribed motion. Preliminary work will be presented.