Promoter: Sam Van Wassenbergh
​Subject: The vast majority of fish use suction to capture prey. Suction feeding is a rapid, powerful action in which expansion of the buccal cavity generates water flow that transports prey into the mouth. The biomechanics and hydrodynamics of suction feeding are expected to change substantially with body size. At small sizes, viscous forces become increasingly important relative to inertial forces, potentially limiting the speed and effectiveness of prey capture. At large sizes, the greater volumes of water that must be accelerated may impose substantial inertial loads, potentially limiting the speed of buccal expansion. However, the consequences of these size-dependent effects for suction-feeding performance remain poorly understood. The objective of this master thesis is to adapt and use an existing axisymmetric computational fluid dynamics (CFD) model of suction feeding in ANSYS Fluent software to investigate the biomechanical and hydrodynamic consequences of scaling head size. By systematically varying model size and applying standardized mechanical constraints, such as a prescribed maximum power input, the study will quantify scaling relationships in head expansion speed and hydrodynamic outputs. The resulting predictions will be compared with published suction-feeding kinematics data, particularly time-to-peak-gape (TTPG), to evaluate whether the predicted scaling relationships are consistent with observed expansion times across fish species. This analysis will help identify how viscous and inertial effects influence suction-feeding performance across sizes and provide insight into the physical constraints that may shape the evolution of suction-feeding mechanisms in fish.