these natural modes of locomotion with engineered systems has been challenging. [11][12][13] In this respect, burgeoning effort has been devoted to developing new simulation tools, physical models, and experimental platforms. Among these engineering tools, soft robotic systems are promising in light of their biologically relevant mechanical compliance, deformability, and modes of locomotion. [4,[14][15][16][17] Untethered soft robots, which can freely move without requiring a physical connection to external hardware and power supplies, are good candidates for studying the locomotion modes of natural invertebrates. [18][19][20][21] Thanks to recent advances in fabrication methods, [22][23][24][25][26] functional materials, [27][28][29] and actuation strategies, [7,[30][31][32][33][34][35] roboticists have proposed several soft robots that are capable of mimicking some features of natural animal locomotion. For example, previous efforts with photo-responsive hydrogels-based robots demonstrated the ability to mimic peristaltic earthworm crawling. [36] Likewise, untethered soft robots powered with shape memory alloy have been shown to exhibit a variety of locomotion modes, including undulation, jumping, crawling through narrow space or walking over rough terrain. [37,38] The application of magnetic soft robots in biomimetic study has received growing attention due to their high controllability. Hu et al. developed a millimeter-scale film robot that achieves multiple locomotion modes,The efficient motility of invertebrates helps them survive under evolutionary pressures. Reconstructing the locomotion of invertebrates and decoupling the influence of individual basic motion are crucial for understanding their underlying mechanisms, which, however, generally remain a challenge due to the complexity of locomotion gaits. Herein, a magnetic soft robot to reproduce midge larva's key natural swimming gaits is developed, and the coupling effect between body curling and rotation on motility is investigated. Through the authors' systematically decoupling studies using programmed magnetic field inputs, the soft robot (named LarvaBot) experiences various coupled gaits, including biomimetic side-to-side flexures, and unveils that the optimal rotation amplitude and the synchronization of curling and rotation greatly enhance its motility. The LarvaBot achieves fast locomotion and upstream capability at the moderate Reynolds number regime. The soft robotics-based platform provides new insight to decouple complex biological locomotion, and design programmed swimming gaits for the fast locomotion of softbodied swimmers.
Data centers have become ubiquitous in the last few years in an attempt to keep pace with the processing and storage needs of the Internet and cloud computing. The steady growth in the heat densities of IT servers leads to a rise in the energy needed to cool them, and constitutes approximately 40% of the power consumed by data centers. However, many data centers feature redundant air conditioning systems that contribute to inefficient air distribution, which significantly increases energy consumption. This remains an insufficiently explored problem. In this paper, a typical, small data center with tiles for an air supply system with a raised floor is used. We use a fluent (Computational Fluid Dynamics, CFD) to simulate thermal distribution and airflow, and investigate the optimal conditions of air distribution to save energy. The effects of the airflow outlet angle along the tile, the cooling temperature and the rate of airflow on the beta index as well as the energy utilization index are discussed, and the optimal conditions are obtained. The reasonable airflow distribution achieved using 3D CFD calculations and the parameter settings provided in this paper can help reduce the energy consumption of data centers by improving the efficiency of the air conditioning.
How muscles are used is a key to understanding the internal driving of fish swimming. However, the underlying mechanisms of some features of the muscle activation patterns and their differential appearance in different species are still obscure. In this study, we explain the muscle activation patterns by using 3D computational fluid dynamics models coupled to the motion of fish with prescribed deformation and examining the torque and power required along the fish body with two primary swimming modes. We find that the torque required by the hydrodynamic forces and body inertia exhibits a wave pattern that travels faster than the curvature wave in both anguilliform and carangiform swimmers, which can explain the traveling wave speeds of the muscle activations. Notably, intermittent negative power (i.e., power delivered by the fluid to the body) on the posterior part, along with a timely transfer of torque and energy by tendons, explains the decrease in the duration of muscle activation towards the tail. The torque contribution from the body elasticity further clarifies the wave speed increase or the reverse of the wave direction of the muscle activation on the posterior part of a carangiform swimmer. For anguilliform swimmers, the absence of the aforementioned changes in the muscle activation on the posterior part is consistent with our torque prediction and the absence of long tendons from experimental observations. These results provide novel insights into the functions of muscles and tendons as an integral part of the internal driving system, especially from an energy perspective, and they highlight the differences in the internal driving systems between the two primary swimming modes.
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