The influence of hydrodynamic damping on the motion of an immersed elastic cantilever

A fluid–structure interaction (FSI) technique is applied to study the influence of hydrodynamic damping on the motion of a cantilever in a still tank. The FSI is performed by a partitioned technique, using the deal.II and OpenFOAM open-source packages. An incompressible flow solver is applied for the fluid and a compressible solver for the structure. The motion of the structure is generated by applying a forced excitation over the coupled boundary creating hydrodynamic damping caused by the induced flow. The large deformation in the structure also makes the case suitable for benchmarking FSI. We perform an extensive parameter dependency study to investigate this application. As a result, we observe that the forced redirection flow varies strongly with mass ratio and magnitude of the force. We also study the difference between the structure in decaying motion and in resonance, triggered by applying traction that is either constant or varying sinusoidally over time. How the force is applied significantly affects the hydrodynamic damping. We have also verified a characteristic beating caused by the adherent swirls to the surface of the cantilever for sufficiently large deformations.