Gabriel Weymouth, Professor, Department of Maritime and Transport Technology Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands

Flexible analysis methods for high-performance hydrodynamics

Dynamic and shape-changing bodies can produce large induced forces with surprising efficiency, making them an intriguing option for high-performance vehicles but complicating their analysis. In this talk, I discuss a few model systems including tandem flapping foils and unsteady jetting vehicles and show the greatest insights (and fastest predictions) are achieved by combining a range of classically separate analysis techniques. For example, we apply potential flow and oscillator models to interpret underwater robotic dynamics, develop Biot-Savart boundary conditions for unbounded viscous flow simulations, and constrain unsteady machine-learning predictions to be physically and dynamically consistent across a range of time scales.

Prof. Gabriel Weymouth

Gabriel D Weymouth is the Chaired Professor of Ship Hydromechanics in the Mechanical Engineering faculty at TU Delft. He received his BSc from Webb Institute, MSc from the University of Iowa, and PhD from MIT under Dick KP Yue. His research focuses flows with dynamic solid and fluid boundaries and the development of physics-based and machine-learning numerical methods for predicting those flows. These studies enabled the design of many biologically-inspired underwater vehicles, leading to a Guiness World Record in underwater robotics. He has also created many open source packages for teaching and research which have been used in universities world-wide.