Mode transition of a film fluttering in a circular cylinder wake

Abstract

As a representative model in the investigation into fluid–structure coupling, a flexible film interacting with the wake of a circular cylinder involves intricate patterns of both solid motion and fluid evolution. Recent investigations have found that the interactions could be either periodic or aperiodic in experiments; the latter, however, is often overlooked. In this work, the irregular aperiodic flutter of a flexible film behind a circular cylinder is investigated experimentally. It is determined that the irregular flutter intermittently exhibits transient quasi-periodic mode and aperiodic mode. The former is accompanied by the large-scale vortices alternatively formed against the film surfaces, while the latter is associated with vortices formed downstream of the film's trailing edge, so that the whole film is enveloped by the extended shear layers. In order to separate the data individually pertaining to each of the two modes from the whole dataset, a motion-mode recognition method is proposed, and then conditional statistics of flow fields are achieved. The quasi-periodic mode corresponds to more intense velocity fluctuations in the wake, while in the aperiodic mode, the observed localized instability of shear layers induces an increase in the local streamwise velocity fluctuation.