Establish and experimentally validate an optimized flexible-raft propulsion design

Develop a formal propulsion optimization that jointly determines raft stiffness and mass distribution, actuator profile and location, and operating frequency, and experimentally validate the resulting predictions for flexible wave-driven propulsion.

Background

The model demonstrates that material stiffness, actuator placement, and forcing frequency jointly control modal excitation, wave asymmetry, thrust magnitude, and propulsion direction. The present computations vary only stiffness and actuator position while holding the remaining parameters at reference values, and they use a two-dimensional model with uniform beam properties and a prescribed forcing profile.

The authors explicitly identify both comprehensive parameter optimization and experimental validation as unresolved. This open problem concerns extending the computational design study to coupled stiffness/mass distributions, actuator characteristics, and operating frequency, followed by laboratory tests of the predicted flexible-raft behavior.