Numerical simulations of fluid‒structure interaction (FSI) on an elastic foil heaving with constant amplitude in freestream flow are carried out at a low Reynolds number of 20,000. The commercial software STAR-CCM+ is employed to solve the flow field and the large-scale passive deformation of the structure. The results show that introducing a certain degree of flexibility significantly improves the thrust and efficiency of the foil. For each Strouhal number St considered, an optimal flexibility exists for thrust; however, the propulsive efficiency keeps increasing with the increase in flexibility. The visualisation of the vorticity fields elucidates the improvement of the propulsive characteristics by flexibility. Furthermore, the mechanism of thrust generation is discussed by comparing the time-varying thrust coefficient and vortex structure in the wake for both rigid and elastic foils. Finally, in addition to sinusoidal motions, we also consider the effect of non-sinusoidal trajectories defined by flattening parameter S on the propulsive characteristics for both rigid and elastic foils. The non-sinusoidal trajectories defined by S=2 are associated with the maximum thrust, and the highest values of propulsive efficiency are obtained with S=0.5 among the cases considered in this work.
Hydrofoil is widely used in underwater vehicle for the excellent hydrodynamic characteristics. Currently, researches are mostly about the rigid hydrofoil while the flexible hydrofoil, like the caudal fin, has not been studied adequately. In this paper, the fish was regarded as the bionic object. Then the kinematics model to describe the fish swimming was put forward. A fin-peduncle propulsion mechanism was designed based on the kinematics model to achieve the similar sine curve swimming model. The propulsion mechanism was optimized by Matlab to reduc the deviation between the output curve of the fin-peduncle propulsion mechanism and the ideal motion trajectory. Moreover, the motion phase angles among flexible articulations are optimized to reduce fluid resistance and improve propulsive efficiency. Finally, the fish-like hydrofoil oscillation is simulated by fluid-solid coupling method based on the Fluent. It was shown that the optimized flexible fish-like oscillation could generate the motion that follows the similar law of sine. The propulsive efficiency of oscillating hydrofoil propeller is much higher than that of the screw propeller, and the flexible oscillation has higher propulsive efficiency than the rigid oscillation without obvious fluid resistance increase.
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