The dynamics of a rigid inverted flag
- Creators
- Leontini, Justin S.
- Sader, John E.
Abstract
An 'inverted flag' – a flexible plate clamped at its trailing edge – undergoes large-amplitude flow-induced flapping when immersed in a uniform and steady flow. Here, we report direct numerical simulations of a related single degree-of-freedom mechanical system: a rigid plate attached at its trailing edge to a torsional spring. This system is termed a 'rigid inverted flag' and exhibits the dynamical states reported for the (flexible) inverted flag, with additional behaviour. This finding shows that the flapping dynamics of inverted flags is not reliant on their continuous flexibility, i.e. many degrees of freedom. The rigid inverted flag exhibits additional, novel states including a heteroclinic-type orbit that results in small-amplitude flapping, and a number of chaotic large-amplitude flapping regimes. We show that the various routes to chaos are driven by a series of periodic states, including at least two which are subharmonic. The instability and competition between these periodic states lead to chaos via type-I intermittency, mode competition and mode locking. The rigid inverted flag allows these periodic states and their subsequent interaction to be explained simply: they arise from an interaction between a preferred vortex shedding frequency and a single natural frequency of the structure. The dynamics of rigid inverted flags is yet to be studied experimentally, and this numerical study provides impetus for such future work.
Copyright and License
© The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press. This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution and reproduction, provided the original article is properly cited.
Funding
J.S.L. acknowledges the provision of resources and services via competitive grant IZ4 from the National Computational Infrastructure (NCI) which is supported by the Australian Government. J.S.L. acknowledges the provision of computational resources at OzSTAR which is funded by Swinburne University of Technology and National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy (NCRIS). J.E.S. acknowledges support from the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence in Exciton Science (CE170100026) and the Australian Research Council grants scheme.
Conflict of Interest
The authors report no conflict of interest.
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Additional details
- ISSN
- 1469-7645
- National Computational Infrastructure
- IZ4
- Swinburne University of Technology
- Australian Research Council
- CE170100026