The last “iMMCminar” for this academic year is scheduled. It will be given by Prof. Karen Mulleners (Unsteady flow diagnostics laboratory, EPFL) on Monday, July 7, 2025, at 15:00.

Nature is full of thin, flexible objects that bend, flutter, or flap in the wind or the water such as leaves of trees and bushes, insect wings, and fish fins. A remarkable feature that is common to these objects is their ability to deform when interacting with the air or the water in a way that benefits them. Leaves of trees bend in the wind to reduce their resistance and the loads on their stems. The flexibility of insect wings and fish fins can reduce the effort the animals need to stay aloft or to propel themselves and increase their performance and agility. In our lab, we design unsteady fluid-structure interaction experiments to study how flexible structures deform or reconfigure to change their fluid dynamic performance and resilience in dynamic flow environments. In this talk, I will show some examples of recent work investigating the fluid-structure interactions of deformable flapping wings, reconfiguring disks, and undulatory swimming robots.