Investigation on Hydrodynamic Performance of Flapping Foil Interacting with Oncoming Von Karman Wake of a D-Section Cylinder

Flapping foils are studied to achieve an efficient propeller. The performance of the flapping foil is influenced by many factors such as oncoming vortices, heaving amplitude, and geometrical parameters. In this paper, investigations are performed on flapping foils to assess its performance in the wake of a D-section cylinder located half a diameter in front of the foil. The effects of heaving amplitude and foil thickness are examined. The results indicate that oncoming vortices facilitate the flapping motion. Although the thrust increases with the increasing heaving amplitude, the propelling efficiency decreases with it. Moreover, increasing thickness results in higher efficiency. The highest propelling efficiency is achieved when the heaving amplitude equals ten percent of the chord length with a symmetric foil type of NACA0050 foil. When the heaving amplitude is small, the influence of the thickness tends to be more remarkable. The propelling efficiency exceeds 100% and the heaving amplitude is 10% of the chord length when the commonly used equation is adopted. This result demonstrates that the flapping motion extracts some energy from the oncoming vortices. Based on the numerical results, a new parameter, the energy transforming ratio (R-ET), is applied to explicate the energy transforming procedure. The R-ET represents that the flapping foil is driven by the engine or both the engines and the oncoming vortices with the range of R-ET being (0, Infini) and (-1, 0), respectively. With what has been discussed in this paper, the oncoming wake of the D-section cylinder benefits the flapping motion which indicates that the macro underwater vehicle performs better following a bluff body.