Nonlinear aerodynamic forces on thin flat plate: Numerical study

• Present a numerical simulation of nonlinear aerodynamic forces on a thin flat plate.
• Integrate computational fluid dynamics with forced asymptotic oscillation.
• Identify nonlinear aerodynamic forces using continuous wavelet transform.
• Find high order harmonic aerodynamic forces.

This paper first presents a numerical simulation of nonlinear aerodynamic forces on a thin flat plate through an integration of the computational fluid dynamics (CFD) method and the forced asymptotic oscillation method. The thin flat plate is forced to have either asymptotic torsional oscillation or asymptotic vertical oscillation of increasing amplitude. A multiple-domain mesh technique together with unstructured dynamic meshes is used in the CFD simulation to accommodate large amplitude oscillations of the plate. The instantaneous frequencies and amplitudes of the aerodynamic forces are then identified from the simulated asymptotic aerodynamic force time histories using the continuous wavelet transform (CWT) in terms of the CWT ridges. Extensive numerical studies are finally performed to examine the feasibility of the proposed approach. The results show that the CFD method used in this study can properly simulate nonlinear aerodynamic forces on the plate. The amplitude of the aerodynamic force depends on the amplitude of the forced oscillation and there are high-order harmonic aerodynamic forces of higher frequency than the forced oscillation frequency, both indicating the nonlinearity of aerodynamic forces. The results also show the flutter derivatives associated with self-excited aerodynamic forces depend on the amplitude of forced oscillation in addition to reduced velocity.