Spiders’ Ballooning Flight as a Model for the Exploration of Hazardous Atmospheric Weather Conditions

Cho, Moonsung; Affeld, K.; Neubauer, Peter; Rechenberg, Ingo

doi:10.1007/978-3-319-95972-6_12

Cited by 1 publication

(2 citation statements)

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“…Referring to equation (23), and assuming that the following parameters are unchanged during typical ballooning: thread electric charge, Q t , the atmospheric electric field, E 0 , the air viscosity, µ and the spider weight, W s , the spider could control its ballooning velocity by varying the thread length, l t and the number of threads. In the presence of significant wind speed, the spider could also control the flight altitude and direction by varying the number and length of ballooning threads.…”

Section: B Ballooning Velocitymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Thus, in the current paper we develop a new three-dimensional numerical model including the viscous forces, weight and dimensions of the thread and spider, electrostatic lift force and repelling forces and the elastic bending force to explore the ballooning and unfolding dynamics of spider silk threads. This can help for instance in designing new types of ballooning sensors to explore the atmospheric properties [23].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Ballooning in Spiders using Multiple Silk Threads

Habchi,

Jawed

2021

Preprint

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In this paper, three-dimensional numerical simulations of ballooning in spiders using multiple silk threads are performed using the discrete elastic rods method. The ballooning of spiders is hypothesised to be caused by the presence of the negative electric charge of the spider silk threads and the positive electric potential field in the earth's atmosphere. The numerical model presented here is first validated against experimental data from the open literature. After which, two cases are examined, in the first it is assumed that the electric charge is uniformly distributed along the threads while in the second, the electric charge is located at the thread tip. It is shown that the normalized terminal ballooning velocity, i.e. the velocity at which the spiders balloon after they reach steadystate, decrease linearly with the normalized lift force, especially for the tip located charge case. For the uniform electric charge case, this velocity shows a slightly weaker dependence on the normalized lift force. Moreover, it is shown in both cases that the normalized terminal ballooning velocity has no dependence on the normalized elastic bending stiffness of the threads and on the normalized viscous forces. Finally, the multi-thread bending process shows a three-dimensional conical sheet.Here we show that this behavior is caused by the Coulomb repelling forces owing to the threads electric charge which leads to dispersing the threads apart and thus avoid entanglement.

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Section: B Ballooning Velocitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%