Institute Members Participate in Research Funded by NSFC Major Research Plan

Institute members, Dr. Jun Zhang and Dr. Jinzi Mac Huang have recently received a grant, as Co-PIs, from the Major Research Plan of National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC). The project, led by Tshinghua University, seeks to study the physical mechanisms of flapping flight and swimming under complex flow conditions, which will shed light on the further studies and future application in relevant fields.

“Traditional research on flapping locomotion focus on the flow-wing or flow-fin interaction with ‘clean’ flows. Now we propose to focus on a realistic flow condition, which could be turbulent or messy,” explained Dr. Zhang, Professor of Physics and Mathematics at NYU Shanghai and NYU, “We want to study if messy flow conditions will benefit flapping flight performance or not.”

The research team will adopt the methods of computational simulations and experimental studies to conduct the research, and the NYU Shanghai team will be active on the experimental research and the overall assessment of the funded project.   

“We are grateful for the funding from NSFC,” commented Dr. Huang, NYU Shanghai Assistant Professor of Mathematics, “This grant will greatly facilitate the fluid mechanics research at NYU Shanghai and our collaboration with other strong research institutes like Tsinghua University.”