Who amongst us has not marveled at birds flying in formation or wondered how they achieve the amazing flight performance? While we humans have been flying for only a century or so, insects, birds and bats have ruled the skies for over 300 million years, and we are just beginning to understand some of the secrets that have enabled them to move with such elegance, economy, and agility.
Kenny Breuer,
Brown University
In this talk, I will outline some of the work in my lab on the aerodynamics and fluid mechanics inspired by flying animals and describe some of our experiments and theories that characterize and model flapping flight. I will draw from a decade of work with live birds and bats as well as a series of engineered flapping-wing robots. I will focus on both experiments that characterize and quantify live animal flight, as well as on experiments that use engineered robotic systems that allow us to probe nature’s secrets in a controlled manner (“engineering-inspired biology”) as well to create motion that is inspired by nature (“biology-inspired engineering”).
Kenny Breuer received his Sc.B. from Brown University in Mechanical Engineering (1982) and his Ph.D. from MIT in Aeronautics and Astronautics (1988). He spent two years back at Brown as a Post Doctoral Fellow in Applied Mathematics and nine years on the faculty at MIT, before finally returning to Brown in 1999, where he is currently Professor of Engineering. In 2010 he received a courtesy appointment as Professor of Ecology, Evolution and Organismal Biology. From 2011 to 2014 he served as Senior Associate Dean of Engineering for Academic Programs.
Professor Breuer’s research interests are in the broad field of Fluid Dynamics and cover a wide range of diverse topics. At the macro-scale, he has worked on the mechanics of animal flight, the formation, growth and unsteady dynamics of vortical flows, flow interactions with highly compliant structures such as membrane wings and spring-mounted wings, and energy harvesting from fluid flows. At the micron-scale, he was a pioneer in the mechanics of bacterial motility and flagellar mechanics, the nanoscale flow near a moving contact line and in the development of nanoscale velocimetry techniques. With his students and collaborators, he has co-authored over one hundred peer-reviewed articles in scientific journals, review articles and book chapters. He is the editor of Microscale Diagnostic Techniques (Springer, 2004).
Professor Breuer has also been active in fluid dynamics education and outreach. He is a co-author on the best-selling DVD: Multimedia Fluid Mechanics (Camb. Univ. Press), and co-editor of the compilation of flow visualization: A Gallery of Fluid Motion (Camb. Univ. Press). He has also appeared on programs such as PBS’s NOVA (Bat superpowers, 2021; The four-winged dinosaur, 2008), NPR’s Science Friday, the Discovery Channel’s series Weird Connections, and the BBC’s series Invisible Worlds.
Professor Breuer has received a number of honors and awards including Fellow of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (2013), Fellow of the American Physical Society (2010), Associate Fellow if the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (2013), Chair of the APS-Division of Fluid Dynamics (2012).”