ENERGY EXCHANGE BETWEEN FLUID AND FLAPPING/BENDING STRUCTURES

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Submerged plants with long, flexible leaves or stems are commonly found in many aquatic environments, including rivers, lakes and coastal marine waters. These plants make many significant contributions to the ecological health and water quality of their environments, including acting as sanctuary habitats, sources of food, capturing and storing particulates, reducing bed sediment erosion and turbidity. Using the engineering terminology, the aquatic plants can be defined as composite, anisotropic, viscoelastic, highly heterogeneous structures. Living in flowing waters, aquatic plants experience complex loads which are often presented by a mixture of tension, compression, bending, torsion and shear. The complex and scale dependent fluid-plant interactions are still not well understood. In particular, there are many gaps in the current knowledge related to drag-generating and drag control mechanisms.     Aquatic plants are typically embedded in a superposition of multi-scale boundary layers (BLs) generated by a variety of boundaries including those introduced by the plants themselves. BLs in streams and estuaries differ from the canonical boundary layers. In particular, they are often depth-limited, and they have a multi-scale structure involving effect of the bed roughness and internal effects of the plant boundaries at different scales such as patch, stem and leaf. Another important feature of natural stream BLs is a low ratio of flow depth to roughness height and therefore conventional approaches for their description, such as application of the logarithmic velocity profile, should be done with caution.     In low-submergence boundary layers, aquatic plants experience drag forces imposed by the flowing water. An interesting and unexplored fluid-structure interaction is bending of multiple flexible bodies that are instead obstructing a flow. Such a situation is part of the life of aquatic plants whose morphologies are intimately related to the fluid flows they must endure to survive. Aquatic plants utilize various strategies to minimize the drag. Leaves folding and plant shape streamlining represent examples of the static reconfiguration in response to the changing velocity without involvement of waviness or flutter. Dynamic reconfiguration is a result of non-linear interactions leading to the appearance of flutter constantly changing the plant shape even at a fixed flow velocity. Although recent experimental studies have focused on the plant reconfiguration in flowing water,the theoretical and physical interpretations of this phenomenon are still not well understood. The present proposal is intended to advance the state-of-the-art modeling of the fluid structure interactions of flexible structures subjected to boundary layer flow and wave action. Experiments and numerical simulations are planned to study energy exchange between the fluid flow and flexible structures.