Home▸Nature & Climate▸Jellyfish Jet Propulsion: Buoyancy & Drag (2D)

🪼 Jellyfish Jet Propulsion: Buoyancy & Drag (2D)

A 2D jellyfish swimmer driven by an actual force balance: bell-contraction jet thrust, quadratic water drag and net buoyancy, all tunable live.

Nature & Climate2DModerate60 FPS📱 Mobile-adapted⇄ 3D version

This 2D companion turns the "buoyancy, drag, and propulsion" described for the 3D jellyfish into an actual computed force balance: each bell's radius oscillates through a contraction-relaxation cycle, the rate of volume change during contraction drives a jet-propulsion thrust term, a quadratic drag term opposes motion through the water, and a buoyancy term (set by the body-to-water density ratio) pulls the animal up or down — all summed through Newton's second law every frame rather than scripted as a fixed rise speed.

⚙ Under the hood

Bell radius r(t) oscillates with the pulse-rate and pulse-strength sliders; dV/dt during contraction produces jet thrust, a quadratic drag term (Cd × frontal area × v²) opposes it, and a buoyancy term from the density-ratio slider completes F = thrust + buoyancy − drag, integrated into velocity and position every frame.

jellyfishbuoyancydragjet propulsion

2D · HTML5 Canvas 2D · 60 FPS target · runs fully client-side, no install