STI project receives APS-DFD Video Award
(L-R): Tristan Torres Sanchez, Adrien Maitrot, Gaetan Raynaud. 2025 EPFL CC BY SA
A video created by students in the Unsteady Flow Diagnostics Laboratory in the School of Engineering has received an award from the Gallery of Fluid Motion, organized as part of the annual meeting of the American Physical Society Division of Fluid Dynamics (APS-DFD).
A video produced by master students from the Unsteady Flow Diagnostics Laboratory (UNFoLD), led by Karen Mulleners, in collaboration with the Computational Robot Design and Fabrication Lab (CREATE), led by Josie Hughes, has been selected as a winner in the 2025 APS Division of Fluid Dynamics Gallery of Fluid Motion.
The winning video, Dancing with the wind, learning from the choreography of flapping leaves,is the work of EPFL master students Adrien Maitrot and Tristan Torres Sanchez, who created it during their summer internship in the UNFOLD lab, under the supervision of Gaetan Reynaud.
"Adrien and Tristan are also part of the Artepoly student association, which lent us some of the filming equipment to conduct this project. I think this is a wonderful example of how research and art merge and how labs and student associations can work together," Mulleners said.
The Gallery of Fluid Motion is intended to be a visual record of the aesthetic and science of contemporary fluid mechanics, to be shared both with fellow researchers and the general public. Each year, the submissions are judged for their combination of striking visual qualities and scientific interest, and the top-ranked video and poster entries are designated as Milton Van Dyke Awardees or Gallery Winners, which are subsequently published in APS' journal Physical Review Fluids. The prize was officially awarded during a cermony at the APS-DFD annual meeting.
The UNFoLD lab was also awarded in 2023 for their video To swim fast or go far? Answers from 1-guilla, the robotic eel, produced in collaboration with Auke Ijspeert’s Biorobotics Laboratory (BioRob), and in 2022 for their project,Reconfiguring it out: How flexible structures interact with fluid flows.
