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SUMMARY:G I TAYLOR LECTURE - The Silent Flight of the Owl - Professor Nige
 l Peake\, Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics 18.00 
 - 19.00
DTSTART:20200127T180000Z
DTEND:20200127T190000Z
UID:TALK121336@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Beverley Larner
DESCRIPTION:When hunting many\, but not all\, species of owl manage to fly
  almost silently in the audible frequency range of both themselves and the
 ir prey. A complete understanding of how this is done has yet to be found\
 , but it is believed that three rather unusual features of the owl wing an
 d feathers play a significant role.  These features include a leading-edge
  comb of barbs\, a porous and flexible trailing edge brush\, and a particu
 larly unusual microstructure in the feathers which leads to a velvet-like 
 wing suction surface. Although the first feature is found on other raptors
 \, the second two are quite unique to owls which hunt in acoustic stealth.
  In this talk I will describe a range of theoretical and experimental rese
 arch which has been conducted to attempt to understand these mechanisms. I
 t is well-known in other contexts\, including  aircraft landing noise and 
 wind turbines\,   that a turbulent boundary layer passing over a wing trai
 ling edge is a potentially potent source of noise\, and so a particular fo
 cus of our work has been to investigate the ways in which the owl’s adap
 tations may have  weakened this noise mechanism. An owl-inspired trailing-
 edge noise control device will be described. 
LOCATION:Bristol-Myers Squibb Lecture Theatre\, Department of Chemistry
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