Modelling and simulation applied to a project of biomimicry

Hello everyone, we are a team of three students in Master 1 in Earth Sciences and Environment in UniLaSalle, France. We would like to present our project which took place this year. We decided to choose it because it was all new and could possibly lead to great technological innovation. Torquigener Albomaculous is a little puffer-fish as its congener all over the world but it has an incredible and unique particularity: it builds large structures with sediments during nesting. These stuctures are made of two great patterns, several channels on the outside part and a complex shape on the inside part, reminding arabesques. Several studies about description of the specie, discovered in 2012, and its behaviour were published by Japanese ichthyologists (MATSUURA, 2014; KAWASE et al., 2013, 2015 and 2017). Some studies tend to show that the female is not choosing a nest depending of the iteration of the pattern nor the size of the nest, an hypothesis emitted is that the shape of the nest have an influence on currents and that’s for this reason that a female chooses a nest an not another. The purpose of this project is to validate, or invalidate, this scientific hypothesis by modelling the nest with CATIA and, by a flow simulation with several variables, to test influence of the shape and iterations on the current. For this purpose, we used ABAQUS and X-FLOW. A very important thing is that it may possibly lead to industrial application in protecting coasts and off-shore structures all over the world ! Thank you.