No abstract

The purpose of this work is to develop an innovative procedure for reconstructing the pressure field from PIV velocity measurements of unsteady, incompressible flows. The proposed technique is based on a generalization of the Glowinski–Pironneau method for the uncoupled solution of the incompressible Navier–Stokes equations written in primitive variables and exploits a finite element discretization of the measurement grid. By virtue of the underlying mathematical formulation, the method is stable and more accurate than the other techniques proposed so far in the literature. The method is first applied to an exact solution of the Navier–Stokes equations, showing second-order convergence of the L∞ error for the pressure variable. The robustness of the method with respect to stochastic perturbations in the velocity field is then tested and the results compared with other techniques proposed in the literature. Finally, the proposed technique is applied to both phase-averaged and time-resolved PIV velocity measurements of the flow around a pitching airfoil employed to investigate the dynamic stall. The reconstructed pressure is compared with direct pressure measurements, showing very encouraging results

In this work, we investigate the subcritical behaviour of a coaxial jet subject to small-amplitude perturbations at the inflow. We use the results of optimal harmonic analysis and dynamic-mode decomposition (DMD) of the flow fields at a Reynolds number, based on the diameter and maximum velocity of the inner inlet pipe, of $Re=200$, to show that, for a sufficiently low value of the Reynolds number, the coherent structures appearing in the perturbed dynamics of the nonlinear system can be effectively described in terms of the harmonic response of the flow. We also show that, for larger subcritical values of the Reynolds number, $Re=400$, a huge amplification of disturbances quickly makes nonlinear effects relevant. Large-scale, near-field coherent dynamics can be still interpreted as an evidence of the preferred response of the system, using DMD of the flow to describe the noise-driven transition to turbulence downstream. The influence of the axial velocity ratio and the rotational motion of the outer stream are assessed as well. Harmonic analysis successfully predicts the prevalence of rotating helical structures observed in the columnar flow for moderate swirl of the outer jet. Finally, we compare the receptivity of the nonlinear system to the optimal linear perturbations with its response to stochastic forcing. Optimal forcing is still more effective than white noise in driving the system to a turbulent state, where nonlinear dynamics prevails. We still conclude that linear optimal forcing may be relevant in investigating the transition to turbulence in coaxial jets, even if more about the transition process could be learnt from a more expensive nonlinear analysis.

No abstract