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.