Dingyi Pan

Numerical investigations on the compressibility of a DPD fluid

The compressibility of a dissipative particle dynamics (DPD) fluid is studied numerically through several newly developed test models, where both the density and the divergence of the velocity field are considered. In the case of zero conservative force, the DPD fluid turns out to be compressible. Effects of the compressibility are observed to be reduced as the particle mass is chosen to be smaller and the system temperature to be higher. In the case of non-zero conservative force, the condition of constant density and divergence-free of velocity can be approximately achieved at large values of the repulsion parameter (i.e., weakly compressible flow). Furthermore, the speed of sound and local Mach number are computed and found to be in good agreement with the theoretical estimation.

Hydrodynamic performance of a fishlike undulating foil in the wake of a cylinder

The hydrodynamic performances of a fishlike undulating foil in the wake of a D-section cylinder are numerically investigated by using a modified immersed boundary method. The results regarding the effects of various controlling parameters, including the distance between the foil and the D-cylinder, the frequency and the phase angle of foil’s undulation, and the phase angle of heaving motion on the thrust and the input power, are reported. It is observed that the foil without undulation in the vortex street can gain a thrust, as a result of the fact that the passing vortices produce reverse flows with respect to the mainstream in vicinity of the foil surface. When an undulating foil is placed at different distances behind the D-section cylinder, different wake structures form behind the cylinder. The wake area can be divided into three domains: suction domain, thrust enhancing domain, and weak influence domain. The undulation of the foil can inhibit the roll-up instability of the shear layers and vortex shedding from the cylinder and consequently significantly enlarge the suction domain, compared to the foil-free case or the stationary foil case. The thrust on the foil first increases and then decreases, as the distance between the foil and the cylinder increases. The undulation plays a negative role in the foil propulsion when the foil is located near the cylinder (largely in the suction domain) and a positive role when the distance between the foil and the cylinder is beyond a critical value. The mean thrusts do not vary significantly with the undulation phase angle when the heaving motion is not considered and the undulation amplitude studied is relatively small, instead, they are significantly affected by the phase angle of the heaving motion. The foil bypassing the vortices undergoes both minimum thrust and input power, whereas the one passing through vortices experiences a larger thrust. The phase angle difference between the heave and the undulation is important.

Inertial effects of the semi-passive flapping foil on its energy extraction efficiency

The inertia plays a significant role in the response of a system undergoing flow-induced vibrations, which has been extensively investigated by previous researchers. However, the inertial effects of an energy harvester employing the mechanism of flow-induced vibrations have attracted little attention. This paper concentrates on a semi-passive energy extraction system considering its inertial effects. The incompressible Navier-Stokes equations are solved using a finite-volume based numerical solver with a moving grid technique. A partitioned method is used to couple the fluid and structure motions with the sub-iteration technique and an Aitken relaxation, which guarantees a strong fluid-structure coupling. In addition, a fictitious mass is added to resolve the numerical instability aroused by low density ratios. First, at a fixed mass ratio of r = 1, we identify an optimal set of parameters, at which a maximum efficiency of η = 34% is achieved. Further studies with r ranging from 0.125 to 100 are performed...

Hydrodynamics of a flapping foil in the wake of a D-section cylinder

The water environment of swimming fish in nature is always complex which includes various vortices and fluctuations. In order to study the interaction between the fish and its surrounding complex flow, the physical model with a D-section cylinder placed at the front of a flapping foil is employed. The D-section cylinder is used to produce vortices to contact with the foil as well as the vortices shed from the foil. According to the experimental work of Gopalkrishnan et al., there are three interaction modes between vortices shed from the cylinder and the flapping foil, which are expanding wake, destructive interaction and constructive interaction. Here in this article, three of those typical cases are picked up to reproduce the vortices interaction modes with the modified immersed boundary methods and their hydrodynamic performances are studied further. Results show that, for expanding wake mode and destructive interaction mode, the incoming vortices contact with the foil strongly, inducing relative low pressure domains at the leading-edge of the foil and enlarging the thrust of foils. For constructive mode, the foil slalom between the shed vortices from the D-section cylinder do not contact with them obviously and the foil’s thrust is only enlarged a little.

NUMERICAL STUDIES ON THE PROPULSION AND WAKE STRUCTURES OF FINITE-SPAN FLAPPING WINGS WITH DIFFERENT ASPECT RATIOS

An immersed-boundary method is used to investigate the flapping wings with different aspect ratios ranging from 1 to 5. The numerical results on wake structures and the performance of the propulsion are given. Unlike the case of the two-dimensional flapping foil, the wing-tip vortices appear for the flow past a three-dimensional flapping wing, which makes the wake vortex structures much different. The results show that the leading edge vortex merges into the trailing edge vortex, connects with the wing tip vortices and then sheds from the wing. A vortex ring forms in the wake, and exhibits different patterns for different foil aspect ratios. Analysis of hydrodynamic performances shows that both thrust coefficient and efficiency of the flapping wing increase with increasing aspect ratio.

The correlation between wake transition and propulsive efficiency of a flapping foil: A numerical study

We study numerically the propulsive wakes produced by a flapping foil. Both pure pitching and pure heaving motions are considered, respectively, at a fixed Reynolds number of Re = 1700. As the major innovation of this paper, we find an interesting coincidence that the efficiency maximum agrees well with the 2D-3D transition boundary, by plotting the contours of propulsive efficiency in the frequency-amplitude parametric space and comparing to the transition boundaries. Although there is a lack of direct 3D simulations, it is reasonable to conjecture that the propulsive efficiency increases with Strouhal number until the wake transits from a 2D state to a 3D state. By comparing between the pure pitching motion and the pure heaving motion, we find that the 2D-3D transition occurs earlier for the pure heaving foil than that of the pure pitching foil. Consequently, the efficiency for the pure heaving foil peaks more closely to the wake deflection boundary than that of the pure pitching foil. Furthermore, sinc...

Studies on liquid–liquid interfacial tension with standard dissipative particle dynamics method

The interfacial tension of immiscible liquid–liquid interface is studied with a standard dissipative particle dynamics (DPD) method, in which two different interfacial tension measuring approaches, i.e. the Irving–Kirkwood approach and droplet retraction approach, are employed. The droplet retraction approach predicts a lower interfacial tension than that predicted by the Irving–Kirkwood approach. With the origin standard DPD method, the conservative parameter between different species () plays an important role in the prediction of the interfacial tension. The smaller the , the more accurate results are obtained. A low-density gap is found around the interface of the standard DPD simulation with a large . For simulating droplet deformation in elongation flow, the large density gap found on the interface between the droplet and its surrounding fluid is believed to be the reason of the overestimation of the interfacial tension. By reducing the compressibility of origin DPD fluid, a better agreement of the interfacial tensions found between these two approaches to be obtained. It also permits a close agreement with the experimental work for droplet deformation in an elongation flow.

Lees–Edwards boundary condition for simulation of polymer suspension with dissipative particle dynamics method

The Lees–Edwards boundary condition (LEbc) is widely used in particle-based simulation for producing shear flow. Application of traditional LEbc in dissipative particle dynamics (DPD) method may encounter certain problems, e.g. it will destroy the momentum conservation law at the near boundary region, and the coordinate system gives an incorrect end-to-end vector for polymer beads. Special treatments of the implementation of LEbc in DPD method are introduced in this paper. A single side ghost layer is used to keep the momentum conservation, and the global coordinate system is employed to obtain a correct calculation of the spring force between polymer beads. The simulation results give a good prediction of velocity profile and system temperature, and the elastic dumbbell model for current method can well represent the Oldroyd-B fluid.

On the Propulsive Performance of Tandem Flapping Wings with a Modified Immersed Boundary Method

The modified immersed boundary method is introduced and applied to study the propulsive mechanism of a tandem flapping wings system. The effects of tandem wings distance and phase lag between the two flapping wings are investigated. Thrust force of the upstream wing is nearly constant and close to the magnitude of single flapping wing system. Thrust force of second wing is influenced by the distance and phase lag. With specific parameters, the second wing can obtain a maximum thrust which is larger than the one of first wing. The flow structures of the wake flow are classified into three different formations, and they are correlated to the trends of thrust force. The effects of distance and phase lag are coupled other than isolated. It is possible to lower down the power consumption of this tandem flapping wings system and enhance the total thrust force of the system at the same time.

Exponential-time differencing schemes for low-mass DPD systems

Abstract Several exponential-time differencing (ETD) schemes are introduced into the method of dissipative particle dynamics (DPD) to solve the resulting stiff stochastic differential equations in the limit of small mass, where emphasis is placed on the handling of the fluctuating terms (i.e., those involving random forces). Their performances are investigated numerically in some test viscometric flows. Results obtained show that the present schemes outperform the velocity-Verlet algorithm regarding both the satisfaction of equipartition and the maximum allowable time step.