Consideration of thrust in escaping motion of a mosquito larva

Abstract

Purpose of this study is to understand a thrust generation mechanism of a swimming mosquito larva. A quick escaping swimming behaved in their dangerous situations. A time-varying motion of a tail related a thrust was investigated by a motion capture method. Moreover, the velocity fields around the tail were measured by micro Particle Image Velocimetry (PIV) system. It was found that their unique wriggling motion generated the thrust in all sequence whereby an effective utilization of a vortex ring. The convenient way to estimate the thrust according to kinetic energy of the vortex ring was proposed in this paper.