Author(s): Ingrid Seifert

Abstract: Passive splitter plates attached to the rear of a bluff body can weaken vortex shedding, yet most prior computational work has treated the plate as either perfectly rigid or uniformly flexible. This research introduces a graded-stiffness concept in which the bending rigidity of a rear-mounted flexible splitter plate increases linearly from its root (attached to the cylinder surface) to its free tip, and examines its effect on the wake of a circular cylinder at Reynolds numbers of 100, 150 and 200 through two-dimensional fluid–structure interaction simulations. The plate length was fixed at six diameters (L/D = 6) and the non-dimensional stiffness parameter K* was varied from 0.05 to 1.50 across eight cases. Drag reduction reached 26.7% at K* = 1.50 and Re = 150, while the root-mean-square lift coefficient dropped by up to 81.4% at the same stiffness. The Strouhal number decreased monotonically with rising K*, confirming progressive suppression of the von Kármán street. A logarithmic fit between K* and drag reduction yielded r = 0.821 (p<0.001), indicating a strong but saturating relationship. The graded plate outperformed its uniform-stiffness counterpart by 4–7 percentage points in drag reduction, an advantage attributed to better root compliance allowing the plate to track the near-wake oscillation while the stiffer tip blocks reverse flow and lengthens the recirculation bubble.

DOI: https://www.doi.org/10.22271/27078043.2026.v7.i2a.139

Pages: 61-64 | Views: 89 | Downloads: 45

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