A fast Chebyshev method for simulating flexible-wing propulsion

Abstract We develop a highly efficient numerical method to simulate small-amplitude flapping propulsion by a flexible wing in a nearly inviscid fluid. We allow the wing's elastic modulus and mass density to vary arbitrarily, with an eye towards optimizing these distributions for propulsive performance. The method to determine the wing kinematics is based on Chebyshev collocation of the 1D beam equation as coupled to the surrounding 2D fluid flow. Through small-amplitude analysis of the Euler equations (with trailing-edge vortex shedding), the complete hydrodynamics can be represented by a nonlocal operator that acts on the 1D wing kinematics. A class of semi-analytical solutions permits fast evaluation of this operator with O ( N log ⁡ N ) operations, where N is the number of collocation points on the wing. This is in contrast to the minimum O ( N 2 ) cost of a direct 2D fluid solver. The coupled wing–fluid problem is thus recast as a PDE with nonlocal operator, which we solve using a preconditioned iterative method. These techniques yield a solver of near-optimal complexity, O ( N log ⁡ N ) , allowing one to rapidly search the infinite-dimensional parameter space of all possible material distributions and even perform optimization over this space.