Large motion visualization and estimation for fluid-structure simulations

Studies of fluid-structure interactions associated with flexible structures such as flapping wings require the capture and quantification of large motions of bodies that may be opaque. As a case study, motion capture of a free flying insect is considered by using three synchronized high-speed cameras. A solid finite element (FE) representation is used as a reference body and successive snapshots in time of the displacement fields are reconstructed via an optimization procedure. One of the original aspects of this work is the formulation of an objective function and the use of shadow matching and strain-energy regularization. With this objective function, the authors penalize the shape differences between silhouettes of the captured images and the FE representation of the deformed body. A similar method with a three-dimensional voxel cloud (VC) reconstruction is also illustrated. Challenges faced in implementing the VC method are discussed and the current computational implementation will also be covered.