Sensitivity of the least stable modes to passive control for a flow around an elastically-mounted circular cylinder

TL;DR

This paper introduces a method to compute how the least stable modes in fluid-structure interaction systems respond to local forces, aiding in flow control around elastically-mounted cylinders.

Contribution

It presents an adjoint-based sensitivity analysis methodology for fluid-structure systems, applied to flow around elastically-mounted cylinders, revealing how sensitivities vary with reduced velocity.

Findings

Sensitivity fields differ significantly from fixed structures.

Sensitivity varies greatly with reduced velocity.

Control based on sensitivity analysis can suppress vibrations.

Abstract

In this paper, a methodology to calculate the sensitivity of the least stable modes of fluid-structure interaction systems with respect to local forces is presented. We make use of the adjoint equations of the flow-structure coupled system to calculate the gradients, and the algorithms were implemented using the spectral/\emph{hp} element method for the spatial discretization. The methodology was applied to two-dimensional incompressible laminar steady flows around an elastically-mounted circular cylinder, and we obtained the gradients of the real and imaginary parts of the least stable eigenvalues with respect to forces located at arbitrary points in the flow domain. Selected values of mass ratio and reduced velocity were considered in the simulations, and the results were compared to those obtained for a fixed cylinder at the same Reynolds number. We noticed that the sensitivity fields of the fluid-structure interaction system can be very different from its fixed structure counterpart, and amongst the cases, with an elastic structure, the fields vary greatly according to the reduced velocity. Finally, the sensitivity results were verified against linear and nonlinear simulations of flows with small control cylinders placed at locations selected according to the sensitivity fields. The agreement between the predictions made with the sensitivity analyses and the linear and nonlinear results of the forced flows was excellent. In some cases, it was possible to completely suppress the cylinder vibration.