Fish perform various propulsive maneuvers while swimming by generating traveling waves along their bodies and producing thrust through tail strokes. Anguilliform swimmers spread motion along the body, while carangiform swimmers' motion is more prominent near their tails. Many species also switch between continuous undulation and intermittent swimming, such as burst-and coast maneuver, which can save energy but can also change the wake structure and hydrodynamic forces. Our current study aims at explaining how duty cycle (DC), undulatory gaits, and Strouhal number (St), shape the near-body vortices, overall wakes, and the hydrodynamic forces. We carry out three-dimensional simulations at Re = 3000 for flows around tethered models of an eel (anguilliform) and a Jack Fish (carangiform) for DC = 0.2 -1.0 and St = 0.30 and 0.40 with a constant incoming flow velocity. Our results reveal that the burstand-coast motion for both swimmer produce bow-shaped wakes, the two rows of which on the sides approach each other to form a more coherent wake as DC is increased to 1.0 that corresponds to the wake of continuously undulating swimmers. It is also found that the intermittent motion at a higher Strouhal number produces more drag, contrary to the continuous undulatory kinematics. We further investigate this behavior by quantifying the strengths of vortices produced around the two swimmers and their instantaneous kinematic metrics. A detailed analysis for the role of different body sections in the production of unsteady streamwise forces is also presented. These insights provide important connections between the swimmers' physiologies, their kinematics, and the governing vortex dynamics to attain certain hydrodynamic metrics for designing next-generation autonomous bio-inspired underwater robots.
Maleksabet et al. (2026) studied this question.