Prediction of Unsteady Flow Fields and Trajectories of Tumbling Plates Using Reduced Order Modeling

Abstract

Prediction of unsteady flow fields and trajectories at different instants of time and for varying values of the ratio of the density of a tumbling plate to that of the ambient fluid is carried out using Proper Orthogonal Decomposition with Interpolation (PODI) which is an extension of Proper Orthogonal Decomposition (POD) on snapshots of flowfields simulated by computational fluid dynamics (CFD) softwares. Similar predictions have also been obtained using the method of Singular Value Decomposition (SVD). Pressure distributions, aerodynamic loads and trajectories of the centre of mass of tumbling plates obtained from reduced order modeling are then validated with the CFD simulations. It is shown that the results obtained by means of Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) are accurate compared to the results obtained from Proper Orthogonal Decomposition Interpolation (PODI).