How a Rattlesnake Rattle Makes Its Sound
Written by Alice X. on
A rattlesnake's rattle is a chain of about ten loosely interlocking keratin shells, shaken at tens of hertz. What turns that motion into the sound we hear? Working with a student collaborator, we are building a three-stage model: multi-body contact dynamics of the shells with the level-set discrete element method (LS-DEM), structural vibration of each shell with modal finite-element analysis, and finally acoustic radiation. The longer aim is to extract design rules for bio-inspired interlocking structures with tunable vibration and sound.