When a turbulent vortex impinges on a porous layer, it creates a complex multiscale interaction: the wake structures that form in the free fluid engage with the intricate geometry of the pores, and this interplay governs both the turbulent energy budget and the rate of heat transfer. Here we use interface-resolved two-dimensional direct numerical simulations (DNS) to examine how a bluff-body wake impinges on an in-line porous array heated to maintain a constant wall temperature. The Reynolds number is fixed at Re = 10000, and the porosity is varied between $ϕ$ = 0.80 and $ϕ$ = 0.95. In all cases, the incoming von Kármán vortices undergo rapid breakdown at the porous/fluid interface and do not persist as coherent macroscale structures within the porous layer. The interface instead acts as a spectral filter: large-scale wake energy is strongly attenuated, while turbulence is regenerated locally within the matrix via shear layers and microscale vortex shedding around individual obstacles. Thermal statistics show that the lower-porosity medium produces higher local and surface-averaged Nusselt numbers across representative interface and interior locations. This is consistent with the stronger shear and enhanced fluid/solid thermal interaction associated with the larger surface-area-to-volume ratio. These results clarify the mechanisms by which wake-driven turbulence is converted into pore-scale motions and how porosity tunes the balance between turbulence attenuation and convective heat transfer in porous coatings and inserts.
A series of reduced-order numerical simulations on a specific bluff body type (v-gutters) in a subsonic duct flow is done to assess the unsteady wake dynamics. Two of the v-gutter's geometrical parameters are varied: the v-gutter's base angle ($θ$) and the size of a slit ($ξ$) at the leading-edge of the v-gutter. Turbulent flow kinematics and pressure field are analyzed to evaluate the unsteadiness at a freestream Mach number of $M_\infty = 0.25$ and a freestream Reynolds number based on bluff body's transverse length (L) of $Re_L=0.1 \times 10^6$. Five v-gutter angles are considered ($θ$, $^\…
We study the large-scale helical vortex shedding regime in the wake of an axisymmetric body with a blunt trailing edge at high Reynolds numbers, both experimentally and by means of local, linear, spatiotemporal stability analysis. In the instability analysis we take into account the detailed downstream evolution of the basic flow behind the body base. The study confirms the existence of a finite region of absolute instability for the first azimuthal number in the near field of the wake. Such instability is believed to trigger the large scale helical vortex shedding downstream of the recirculat…
The performances of an original passive control system based on a biomimetic approach are assessed by investigating the flow over a bluff-body. This control device consists in a couple of flaps made from the combination of a rigid plastic skeleton coated with a porous fabric mimicking the shaft and the vane of the bird's feathers, respectively. The sides of a square cylinder have been fitted with this system so as to enable the flaps to freely rotate around their leading edge. This feature allows the movable flaps to self-adapt to the flow conditions. Comparing both the uncontrolled and the co…
The dynamics of a three-dimensional axisymmetric bluff-body wake are examined at low Reynolds regimes where transitions take place through spatio-temporal symmetry breaking. A linear stability analysis is employed to identify the critical Reynolds number associated with symmetry breaking, and the associated eigenmodes, known as global modes. The analysis shows that the axisymmetric stable base flow breaks the rotational symmetry through a pitchfork $m=1$ bifurcation, in agreement with previously reported results for axisymmetric wakes. Above this threshold, the stable base flow is steady and t…
Shape optimization of an active and a passive drag-reducing device on a two-dimensional D-shaped bluff body is performed. The two devices are: Coanda actuator, and randomly-shaped trailing-edge flap. The optimization sequence is performed by coupling the genetic algorithm software DAKOTA to the mesh generator Pointwise and to the CFD solver OpenFOAM. For the the active device the cost functional is the power ratio, whereas for the passive device it is the drag coefficient. The optimization leads to total power savings of $\approx 70\%$ for the optimal Coanda actuator, and a 40\% drag reduction…
Spectral proper orthogonal decomposition (SPOD) analyses are performed for unstratified and stratified wakes of a circular disk at Reynolds number, $U_\infty D/ν= 50,000$, where $U_\infty$ is the freestream velocity and $D$ is the diameter of the circular disk. At $Re= 50,000$, three diameter-based Froude numbers, $\Fro = U_\infty/ND = \infty$, $2$ and $10$ are analyzed. We find that in the unstratified configuration, two modes: (i) the vortex shedding (VS) mode ($m=1, \Str = 0.135$) and (ii) the double helix (DH) mode ($m=2, \Str \rightarrow 0$) are the most dominant features. At far-downstre…
We present in this article the work of Henri Bénard (1874-1939), French physicist who began the systematic experimental study of two hydrodynamic systems: the thermal convection of fluids heated from below (the Rayleigh-Bénard convection and the Bénard-Marangoni convection) and the periodical vortex shedding behind a bluff body in a flow (the Bénard-Kármán vortex street). Across his scientific biography, we review the interplay between experiments and theory in these two major subjects of fluid mechanics.
This sequence of fluid dynamics videos illustrates the behavior of a suspension of noncolloidal particles flowing past various bluff body obstacles within a microfluidic device. The polystyrene particles, of 7 μm diameter and volume fraction of 8.4%, are carefully made neutrally buoyant with the suspending liquid composed of a mixture of water and a small fraction of glycerol. The channel depth is 60 μm and the typical length of the obstacles normal to the flow direction is 200 μm. The flow rate is varied to generate Reynolds numbers based on the scale of the obstacle in the approximate range …
In this study, we present a global Fourier mode decomposition framework for unsteady fluid-structure interaction. We apply the framework to isolate and extract the aeroelastic modes arising from a coupled three-dimensional fluid-membrane system. The proposed framework is employed to decompose the physical variables in the fluid and structural domains into frequency-ranked aeroelastic modes in a unified way. We observe the frequency synchronization between the vortex shedding and the structural vibration via mode decomposition analysis. We examine the role of flexibility in the aeroelastic mode…
A large eddy simulation (LES) study of the flow around a 1/4 scale squareback Ahmed body at $Re_H=33,333$ is presented. The study consists of both wall-resolved (WRLES) and wall-modelled (WMLES) simulations, and investigates the bimodal switching of the wake between different horizontal positions. Within a non-dimensional time-window of 1050 convective flow units, both WRLES and WMLES simulations, for which only the near-wall region of the turbulent boundary layer is treated in a Reynolds-averaged sense, are able to capture horizontal (spanwise) shifts in the wake's cross-stream orientation. E…
Microscale turbulence in porous media is a new physical phenomenon that exhibits unique properties unlike those in classical turbulence flows. At low values of porosity, the surface forces on the solid obstacles compete with the inertial force of the fluid flow to result in the formation of flow instabilities. In this paper, we report the origin and mechanism of a symmetry-breaking phenomenon in periodic porous media that causes a deviation in the direction of the mean flow from that of the applied pressure gradient. Large Eddy Simulation (LES) is used to simulate turbulent flow in a homogeneo…
Although the stability properties of the wake past impervious bluff bodies have been widely examined in the literature, similar analyses regarding the flow around and through porous ones are still lacking. In this work, the effect of the porosity and permeability on the wake patterns of porous rectangular cylinders is numerically investigated at low to moderate Reynolds numbers in the framework of direct numerical simulation combined with local and global stability analyses. A modified Darcy-Brinkman formulation is employed here so as to describe the flow behavior inside the porous media, wher…
New insight into the contribution of the microscale vortex evolution towards convection heat transfer in porous media is presented in this paper. The objective is to determine how the microscale vortices influence convection heat transfer in turbulent flow inside porous media. The microscale temperature distribution is analyzed using flow visualization in 2D using streamlines and in 3D using Q structures. The pertinent observations are supplemented with the comparison of surface skin friction and heat transfer using: (1) surface skin friction lines and (2) joint PDF of pressure and skin fricti…
The high-Reynolds-number wake of a slender body with a turbulent boundary layer is investigated using a hybrid simulation. The wake generator is a 6:1 prolate spheroid and the Reynolds number based on the diameter $D$ is $Re = 10^5$. The transition of the unstratified wake to a state of complete self-similarity is investigated by looking for the first time into the far field of a slender body wake. Unlike bluff-body wakes, here the flow is not dominated by vortex shedding in the near wake. Instead, the recirculation region is very small, the near wake is quasi-parallel and is characterized by …
Periodically forced, oscillatory fluid flows have been the focus of intense research for decades due to their richness as a nonlinear dynamical system and their relevance to applications in transportation, aeronautics, and energy conversion. Recently, it has been observed that turbulent bluff-body wakes exhibit a subharmonic resonant response when excited with specific spatial symmetries at twice the natural vortex shedding frequency, which is hypothesized to be caused by triadic interactions. The focus of this paper is to provide new physical insight into the dynamics of turbulent oscillator …
Formation of recirculating wakes is a prominent feature of inertial flow around bluff bodies. Below the onset of vortex shedding in uniform unbounded flows, the fluid in the recirculating wake region moves on closed planar orbits. The steady wake is thus an isolated zone in the flow and does not exchange fluid with the free stream. In this work, we utilize lattice-Boltzmann simulations and microfluidic experiments to demonstrate that in microchannel inertial flow of Newtonian fluids, the recirculating wake is replaced by a three-dimensional vortical flow. Spiraling streamlines generate a conti…
In RANS simulations for turbulent scalar transport, it is common that using an eddy-viscosity (EV) model to close the Reynolds stress yields reasonable mean flow predictions but large errors in scalar transfer results regardless of scalar flux model inadequacies. This failure mode of EV models is generally related to the fact that the transport of momentum and scalar depends on different Reynolds stress components. The present work addresses two common issues relevant to such failures in turbulent scalar transport around obstacles. The first issue is the general overprediction of scalar transf…
This serial work presents a Linear-Time-Invariance (LTI) notion to the Koopman analysis, finding consistent and physically meaningful Koopman modes and addressing a long-standing problem of fluid-structure interactions: deterministically relating the fluid and structure. Part 1 (Li et al., 2022) developed the Koopman-LTI architecture and applied it to a pedagogical prism wake. By the systematic procedure, the LTI generated a sampling-independent Koopman linearization that captured all the recurring dynamics, finding six corresponding, orthogonal, and in-synch fluid excitation-structure respons…
We present a dynamic decomposition analysis of the wake flow in fluid-structure interaction (FSI) systems under both laminar and turbulent flow conditions. Of particular interest is to provide the significance of low-dimensional wake flow features and their interaction dynamics to sustain the free vibration of a square cylinder at a relatively low mass ratio. To obtain the high-dimensional data, we employ a body-conforming variational fluid-structure interaction solver based on the recently developed partitioned iterative scheme and the dynamic subgrid-scale turbulence model for a moderate Rey…
Brown University(布朗大学);Massachusetts Institute of Technology(麻省理工学院)
Vortex induced vibrations of bluff bodies occur when the vortex shedding frequency is close to the natural frequency of the structure. Of interest is the prediction of the lift and drag forces on the structure given some limited and scattered information on the velocity field. This is an inverse problem that is not straightforward to solve using standard computational fluid dynamics (CFD) methods, especially since no information is provided for the pressure. An even greater challenge is to infer the lift and drag forces given some dye or smoke visualizations of the flow field. Here we employ d…