Analysis on Swimming Behavior of Dolphin with Artificial Tail Flukes

摘要

Dolphins have high propulsion and maneuvering performances.Dolphin’s tail flukes play an important role to generate propulsive force.We paid attention to a dolphin that lost most part of its tail flukes bydisease kept in an aquarium, Okinawa, Japan. The dolphin could swimby attaching artificial tail flukes as well as a normal dolphin. Theobjective of this study is to discuss the effectiveness of the artificial tailflukes for the swimming of the dolphin by estimating the propulsiveforces obtained theoretically using data on the behavior of the tailflukes and swimming number.