Francesco Capuano

LEM Characterization of Synthetic Jet Actuators Driven by Piezoelectric Element: A Review

In the last decades, Synthetic jet actuators have gained much interest among the flow control techniques due to their short response time, high jet velocity and absence of traditional piping, which matches the requirements of reduced size and low weight. A synthetic jet is generated by the diaphragm oscillation (generally driven by a piezoelectric element) in a relatively small cavity, producing periodic cavity pressure variations associated with cavity volume changes. The pressured air exhausts through an orifice, converting diaphragm electrodynamic energy into jet kinetic energy. This review paper considers the development of various Lumped-Element Models (LEMs) as practical tools to design and manufacture the actuators. LEMs can quickly predict device performances such as the frequency response in terms of diaphragm displacement, cavity pressure and jet velocity, as well as the efficiency of energy conversion of input Joule power into useful kinetic power of air jet. The actuator performance is also analyzed by varying typical geometric parameters such as cavity height and orifice diameter and length, through a suited dimensionless form of the governing equations. A comprehensive and detailed physical modeling aimed to evaluate the device efficiency is introduced, shedding light on the different stages involved in the process. Overall, the influence of the coupling degree of the two oscillators, the diaphragm and the Helmholtz frequency, on the device performance is discussed throughout the paper.

Explicit Runge-Kutta schemes for incompressible flow with improved energy-conservation properties

The application of pseudo-symplectic Runge-Kutta methods to the incompressible Navier-Stokes equations is discussed in this work. In contrast to fully energy-conserving, implicit methods, these are explicit schemes of order p that preserve kinetic energy to order q, with q p . Use of explicit methods with improved energy-conservation properties is appealing for convection-dominated problems, especially in case of direct and large-eddy simulation of turbulent flows. A number of pseudo-symplectic methods are constructed for application to the incompressible Navier-Stokes equations and compared in terms of accuracy and efficiency by means of numerical simulations.

Energy preserving turbulent simulations at a reduced computational cost

Energy-conserving discretizations are widely regarded as a fundamental requirement for high-fidelity simulations of turbulent flows. The skew-symmetric splitting of the nonlinear term is a well-known approach to obtain semi-discrete conservation of energy in the inviscid limit. However, its computation is roughly twice as expensive as that of the divergence or advective forms alone. A novel time-advancement strategy that retains the conservation properties of skew-symmetric-based schemes at a reduced computational cost has been developed. This method is based on properly constructed Runge-Kutta schemes in which a different form (advective or divergence) for the convective term is adopted at each stage. A general framework is presented to derive schemes with prescribed accuracy on both solution and energy conservation. Simulations of homogeneous isotropic turbulence show that the new procedure is effective and can be considerably faster than skew-symmetric-based techniques.

Efficient adaptive pseudo-symplectic numerical integration techniques for Landau-Lifshitz dynamics

Numerical time integration schemes for Landau-Lifshitz magnetization dynamics are considered. Such dynamics preserves the magnetization amplitude and, in the absence of dissipation, also implies the conservation of the free energy. This property is generally lost when time discretization is performed for the numerical solution. In this work, explicit numerical schemes based on Runge-Kutta methods are introduced. The schemes are termed pseudo-symplectic in that they are accurate to order p, but preserve magnetization amplitude and free energy to order q > p. An effective strategy for adaptive time-stepping control is discussed for schemes of this class. Numerical tests against analytical solutions for the simulation of fast precessional dynamics are performed in order to point out the effectiveness of the proposed methods.

Low-Cost Energy-Preserving RK Schemes for Turbulent Simulations

A low-cost numerical strategy is presented for energy-preserving simulations of incompressible flows. This method consists in an explicit Runge–Kutta scheme in which the divergence and advective forms of the convective term are suitably alternated within the sub-steps. As a result, the conservation properties of the skew-symmetric form are recovered at a reduced computational cost. The performances and the accuracy of the method are proved by numerical simulations.

BS1 - DNS OF THE TAYLOR-GREEN VORTEX AT RE = 1600

Abstract. SPARK-LES is a Large-Eddy Simulation (LES) code currently under development at the Italian Aerospace Reseacrh Center (CIRA). It solves the fully compressible NavierStokes equations discretized on multi-block, structured grids according to the Finite-Volume (FV) method, using different high-order schemes. In this work a detailed comparison between the schemes is presented in the simulation of a Taylor-Green Vortex in order to assess their accuracy and performances. Temporal behaviour of kinetic energy decay rate and enstrophy is given at different mesh resolutions, showing a good agreeement with DNS results at finer grids. Analysis of power spectra confirms the universal energy cascade behavior.