Effect of material property variation on the dynamic response of a flexible splitter plate attached behind a square cylinder due to flow induced loads

Abstract

This paper presents a numerical study on the dynamic behavior of a flexible splitter plate attached at the rear of a fixed square cylinder subjected to flow at low Reynolds numbers for variable material properties. Elastically bluff-bodies such as square and circulars when placed in an external flow field they undergo self-excited vibration due to synchronization between the vortex shedding frequency and the natural frequency of the bluff-body system. Such vibrations can be catastrophic in nature from the engineering applications point of view. In order to suppress the self-excited vibrations splitter-plates are placed at the rare end of the cylinder. With the aid of systematic direct numerical simulation for low Reynolds number flow, the study shows the importance splitter plates material properties such as the stiffness and density on the response dynamics of the flexible splitter plate which influences the flow induced dynamic forces acting the cylinder. An in-house finite element based solver is used for the flow analysis and the loads on the plate are taken as input to an in-house 2D structural code. The St. Venant-Kirchhoff material model was used.