EXPLORE THE WORLD OF TINEE
Slithering Through the Air With the Greatest of Ease - TINEE WAS THERE
Some people might view a snake that can launch itself from trees and glide through the air as their worst nightmare, something to be avoided, proof positive that human beings were not meant to venture out of doors.
They probably don’t study aerodynamics.
For John J. Socha, how a snake’s body, when flattened with ribs spread, achieves aerodynamic lift is an irresistible question.
Dr. Socha has been studying the paradise tree snake, one of a group of five gliding snakes from Southeast Asia, for more than a decade. And he and others have spent a good amount of time launching the snakes from platforms and videotaping their flight.
They have documented how the snakes leap and how they move when they fly. And in a paper in the Feb. 1 issue of The Journal of Experimental Biology, Daniel Holden, Dr. Socha and colleagues at Virginia Tech and Purdue University analyzed what kind of wing a snake’s body becomes.
They made a model of one section of the body of a paradise tree snake and put it in a water tank. The snake moves in air just the way a snake moves on land or in water, in a constantly moving “S” shape. It doesn’t straighten out and fly like a living javelin; it more or less works its way through the air like the wiggly pipe that it is, with much of its body — the three long sections of the “S” — always broadside to the air flowing over it.
The model played the role of a part of one of these long sections, and water flowing over the model mimicked air flowing over the snake’s body.
They found that at angles between 15 and 40 degrees, the partial snake model achieved better lift than many conventional wing shapes.
This is only a beginning, of course. To fully model the aerodynamics of snake flight will require taking into account the subtle changes in the snake’s “S” shape, at each fraction of a second during its flight.
Aerodynamic studies of flying insects and birds are commonly applied in the design of planes and flying robots. And any new information on unusual wing shapes is useful. But, said Dr. Socha, there are no plans for a flying snake robot. Yet.
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