No Arabic abstract
The flapping flag instability occurs when a flexible cantilevered plate is immersed in a uniform airflow. To this day, the nonlinear aspects of this aeroelastic instability are largely unknown. In particular, experiments in the literature all report a large hysteresis loop, while the bifurcation in numerical simulations is either supercritical or subcritical with a small hysteresis loop. In this paper, this discrepancy is addressed. First weakly nonlinear stability analyses are conducted in the slender-body and two-dimensional limits, and second new experiments are performed with flat and curved plates. The discrepancy is attributed to inevitable planeity defects of the plates in the experiments.
We report the mechanism of the hysteresis in the transition between Regular and Mach reflections. A new discovery is that, the hysteresis loop is in fact the projection of a higher dimensional path, i.e. the valley lines in the surface of dissipation, of which minimal values correspond to stable reflection configurations. Since the saddle-nodes bifurcate the valleies of the surface, they are actually the transition points of the two reflections. Furthermore, the predicted reflection configurations agree well with the experimental and numerical results, which is a validation of this theory.
A new spatial-related mechanism is proposed to understand separation hysteresis processes in curved compression ramp (CCR) flows discovered recently (Hu et al. Phy. Fluid, 32(11): 113601, 2020). Two separation hystereses, induced by variations of Mach number and wall temperature, are investigated numerically. The two hystereses indicate that there must exist parameter intervals of Mach number and wall temperature, wherein both attachment and separation states can be established stably. The relationships between the aerodynamic characteristics (including wall friction, pressure and heat flux) and the shock wave configurations in this two hystereses are analyzed. Further, the adverse pressure gradient (APG) Isb(x) induced by the upstream separation process and APG Icw(x) induced by the downstream isentropic compression process are estimated by classic theories. The trend of boundary layer APG resistence Ib(x) is evaluated from the spatial distributions of the physical quantities such as the shape factor and the height of the sound velocity line. With the stable conditions of separation and attachment, a self-consistent mechanism is obtained when Isb, Icw and Ib have appropriate spatial distributions.
We report an experimental study of the three-dimensional spatial structure of the low frequency temperature oscillations in a cylindrical Rayleigh-B{e}nard convection cell. It is found that thermal plumes are not emitted periodically, but randomly and continuously, from the top and bottom plates. We further found that the oscillation of the temperature field does not originate from the boundary layers, but rather is a result of the horizontal motion of the hot ascending and cold descending fluids being modulated by the twisting and sloshing motion of the bulk flow field.
The dynamics of a thin liquid film on the underside of a curved cylindrical substrate is studied. The evolution of the liquid layer is investigated as the film thickness and the radius of curvature of the substrate are varied. A dimensionless parameter (a modified Bond number) that incorporates both geometric parameters, gravity, and surface tension is identified, and allows the observations to be classified according to three different flow regimes: stable films, films with transient growth of perturbations followed by decay, and unstable films. Experiments and theory confirm that, below a critical value of the Bond number, curvature of the substrate suppresses the Rayleigh-Taylor instability.
A modal stability analysis shows that plane Poiseuille flow of an Oldroyd-B fluid becomes unstable to a `center mode with phase speed close to the maximum base-flow velocity, $U_{max}$. The governing dimensionless groups are the Reynolds number $Re = rho U_{max} H/eta$, the elasticity number $E = lambda eta/(H^2rho)$, and the ratio of solvent to solution viscosity $eta_s/eta$; here, $lambda$ is the polymer relaxation time, $H$ is the channel half-width, and $rho$ is the fluid density. For experimentally relevant values (e.g., $E sim 0.1$ and $beta sim 0.9$), the predicted critical Reynolds number, $Re_c$, for the center-mode instability is around $200$, with the associated eigenmodes being spread out across the channel. In the asymptotic limit of $E(1 -beta) ll 1$, with $E$ fixed, corresponding to strongly elastic dilute polymer solutions, $Re_c propto (E(1-beta))^{-frac{3}{2}}$ and the critical wavenumber $k_c propto (E(1-beta))^{-frac{1}{2}}$. The unstable eigenmode in this limit is confined in a thin layer near the channel centerline. The above features are largely analogous to the center-mode instability in viscoelastic pipe flow (Garg et al., Phys. Rev. Lett., 121, 024502 (2018)), and suggest a universal linear mechanism underlying the onset of turbulence in both channel and pipe flows of suffciently elastic dilute polymer solutions.