• Numerical simulation of vortex-induced vibrations (VIV) of a spring-mounted cylinder using Immersed boundary method is being carried out. The flow solver is based on the sharp interface immersed boundary method, which utilizes ghost cell methodology (Fig. 1). The model is based on an implicit coupling between the flow and structural solver [1]. It couples the flow solver with a finite-element-based structural dynamics solver for simulating large-scale structure deformation with a moving fluid-solid interface.

• As an extension of my M.Tech thesis work at IIT Guwahati, implementation of the proposed mathematical model [2] to a two-dimensional flow past an elastic plate mounted on a rigid cylinder. The problem consists of a two-dimensional laminar channel flow past a thin elastic plate attached to the lee side of a circular cylinder, as defined by Turek and Hron [3]. The circular cylinder is rigid and stationary while the elastic plate is deformable. The fluid is considered to be incompressible and Newtonian while the structure is assumed to be elastic and compressible. The constitutive law for the structure is chosen as Saint Venant-Kirchhoff material in which the elasticity of the structure is characterized by Poisson’s ratio and Young modulus. In this configuration, the flow induces a wave-like deformation in the plate and the plate attains self-sustained periodic oscillation with constant amplitude after a short time.

• Development of a computational model to analyze energy harvesting potential due to flow-induced vibrations of a flexible body.

• This research aims to design and develop an environment-friendly clean source of energy i.e. energy harvesting from VIV. Also, the miniature energy harvesting devices can be very lucrative to various industries (e.g. Internet of Things, sensors) in the future.

References:

[1] R. Mittal, H. Dong, M. Bozkurttas, F. M. Najjar, A. Vargas, and A. von Loebbecke, "A versatile sharp interface immersed boundary method for incompressible flows with complex boundaries," Journal of Computational Physics, vol. 227, pp. 4825-4852, May 2008.

[2] A. K. Pandey, "Constitutive Relation based Coupled Finite Element Formulation for the Fluid-Structure Interaction Problem in a Fully Eulerian Framework," International Journal for Numerical Methods in Engineering, Under Review.

[3] S. Turek and J. Hron, "Proposal for Numerical Benchmarking of Fluid-Structure Interaction between an Elastic Object and a Laminar Incompressible Flow," Notes in Computational Science and Engineering, 2006.