Abstract

Ranging from the fluttering and tumbling of a maple seed to the steady falling of a conker, examples of solid objects falling in air at intermediate Reynolds numbers are everywhere in nature. The trajectories are typically very complex due to the interplay between inertial and viscous effects. This talk will focus on the motion of a Mobius band i.e. a surface which when embedded in three dimensional Euclidean space has only one side and one boundary. This body is very interesting to study due to the large range of different angles of attack present in the body. This leads to many different types of behaviour being observed. I introduce a fluid force model to describe the motion of the system. This is validated through comparison of experimental results collected in the lab with numerical solutions generated using the model. This allows us to characterise an interesting array of different kinds of motion.