Dorsoventral undulation is widely adopted by aquatic mammals for propulsion. As one of the excellent swimmers, dolphins are well known for its capabilities of performing high-efficiency cruising. In the present research, to explore the underlying mechanisms of the efficient dorsoventral propulsion of swimming dolphins, a combined experimental and numerical process is carried out to study the animal's kinematics and hydrodynamics. Using the video graphic technique and virtual skeleton-based surface reconstruction method, a three-dimensional high-fidelity computational model is obtained for the swimming dolphin. Kinematic analysis is performed on this computational model to achieve the time-varying kinematics of the dolphin, and a sharp-interface immersed-boundary-method (IBM) based incompressible computational fluid dynamic (CFD) solver is used to look into the corresponding hydrodynamics and wake structures. The results from this work aim to bring new insight into understanding the force generation mechanisms of dorsoventral swimming and offer potential suggestions to the future designs of unmanned underwater vehicles.
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