Flying Snakes—How Do They Do It?

MULTIMEDIA: PHOTO AND VIDEO AVAILABLE FOR REPORTERSPhotos and video of flying snakes are available upon request.The full study is available upon request.

Newswise — WASHINGTON—They slither, they hiss, they… fly?

Don’t let their wingless bodies fool you—some snakes can glide as far as 100 feet through the air, jumping off tree branches and rotating their ribs to flatten their bodies and move from side to side. New research from a George Washington University professor investigates the workings behind the flight and whether they can be applied to mechanical issues.

Lorena Barba, associate professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering in the GW School of Engineering and Applied Science, and her team, including Anush Krishnan, a senior research assistant at GW and Ph.D. student at Boston University, built a computer model using one of the latest technologies in computing, known as graphic processing units (GPUs), and applied computational fluid dynamics to study the aerodynamics of flying snakes.

The research, titled “Lift and Wakes of Flying Snakes” and conducted at BU, appears March 4 in the journal Physics of Fluids. This work is the first to study the lift of a snake's cross-section computationally.

“With simulation, you can really see the fine details of what is happening in the air as it moves around the object,” Dr. Barba said. “We decided it would be revealing to use this tool to find out, first of all, if we could observe the same feature of lift, and if so, if we would we be able to interrogate the flow by getting detailed quantities and visualizing it.”

Three species of snakes in the genus Chrysopelea are known to glide, and one, Chrysopelea paradisi, has even been seen turning mid-air. At least 30 independent animal lineages have evolved gliding flight, but the flying snake is the only glider without appendages, using a similar mode of locomotion to navigate the earth, water and air.

Dr. Barba’s collaborator, Jake Socha, an assistant professor at Virginia Tech, has been studying and filming the movement of flying snakes for years by launching them from cranes in their natural habitats. His team also built physical models with tubing, testing them in a wind tunnel. The group expected the aerodynamic lift of the snake to increase with the angle of attack (the angle between the profile and the trajectory of flight) and then to drop suddenly after a stall. But what they actually measured was lift that increased at attack angles up to 30 degrees, a sharp boost at an angle of 35 degrees, then a gentle decrease. This suggested snakes use a mechanism called “lift enhancement” to get an extra boost, Dr. Barba said.

With that information, Dr. Barba and her team decided to model a 2-D cross-section of the snake body using GPU-accelerated computational fluid dynamics simulations. The researchers observed the same lift enhancement and were able to measure and visualize the details of air rotation and air pressure. The computer model acts as a “virtual microscope” for fluid mechanics, allowing the researchers to zoom in very close to the body to understand how the air is swirling around the snake.

While Dr. Barba and her team gained knowledge about the aerodynamics of flying snakes, they were only able to study a cross-section of the snake’s body that functions as the animal’s “wing.” Next, Dr. Barba hopes to construct a 3-D model of the snake to investigate how and why the snake wiggles in the air as it flies.

More information about snakes’ flight could have the potential to offer solutions for real-world problems, such as the ideal air flow for a small wind turbine.

The School of Engineering and Applied SciencesGW’s School of Engineering and Applied Science prepares engineers and applied scientists to address society’s technological challenges by offering outstanding undergraduate, graduate and professional educational programs, and by providing innovative, fundamental and applied research activities. The school has five academic departments, 11 research centers, 90 faculty and more than 2,500 undergraduate and graduate students. Core areas of academic excellence include biomedical engineering, cybersecurity, high performance computing, nanotechnologies, robotics and transportation safety engineering.

The George Washington UniversityIn the heart of the nation's capital with additional programs in Virginia, the George Washington University was created by an Act of Congress in 1821. Today, GW is the largest institution of higher education in the District of Columbia. The university offers comprehensive programs of undergraduate and graduate liberal arts study, as well as degree programs in medicine, public health, law, engineering, education, business and international affairs. Each year, GW enrolls a diverse population of undergraduate, graduate and professional students from all 50 states, the District of Columbia and more than 130 countries.

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