The wake dynamics of a rectangular flat-backed bluff body is studied using both the wind tunnel experiment and Improved Delayed Detached Eddy Simulation (IDDES) at Re = 9.2 × 104. Both approaches are systematically investigated in order to provide a quantitative comparison. The wake barycenter deficit and base pressure gradient dynamics are first investigated to characterize the wake states. Second, the known global dynamics such as long-term bi-stability, vortex shedding, and wake pumping are analyzed using proper orthogonal decomposition. It is found that the wake dynamics is globally well captured by the IDDES, but with a more intense activity due to the absence of the fore-body separations observed in the experiment. The coupling of these global dynamics is explored by utilizing low-order modeling in cross planes and elaborating the evolution of the three-dimensional (3D) instantaneous wake flow from IDDES. The shedding of a large-scale hairpin vortex from the horizontal shear layer is closely associated with the pumping motion during wake switchings or switching attempts. A concept model is proposed for 3D bi-stable wake topology, which attempts to elucidate both asymmetric and symmetric wake configurations.

The paper investigates experimentally the flow past a flat-back, taller than wide Ahmed body having rectangular base aspect ratio $H/W=1.11$ in the context of ground vehicle aerodynamics. Parametric studies at Reynolds number $2.1\times 10^5$ explore the sensitivity of the aerodynamic force and body pressure distribution with respect to varying flow conditions defined from variable ground clearance $C$ (taken at mid-distance from the front and rear axles of the body), pitch angle $\alpha$ , and yaw angle $\beta$ (equivalent to a crosswind). Two-dimensional parametric maps in the parametric spaces $(\beta,C)$ and $(\beta,\alpha )$ are obtained for parameter ranges covering real road vehicle driving conditions. The study of the base pressure gradient reveals non-trivial and sharp transitions identified as significant changes of near wake orientation in both parametric spaces. All unsteady transitions correspond to fluctuation crises of the vertical gradient component only. These transitions are summarized in phase diagram representations. Both phase diagrams in $(\beta,C)$ and $(\beta,\alpha )$ parametric spaces can be unified at large yaw in the $(\beta,C_r)$ space, where the rear clearance $C_r$ separating the lower edge of the base from the ground is a simple function of the pitch $\alpha$ and the clearance $C$ . The impacts of the wake transitions are clearly identified in the base drag, drag, lift and side force coefficients. The contribution of the steady near wake $z$ -instability (Grandemange et al., Phys. Fluids, vol. 25, 2013a, pp. 95–103) is assessed by repeating the sensitivity analysis with a rear cavity. As reported previously, the rear cavity suppresses the steady instability by symmetrizing the wake. A domain for the existence of the instability is finally proposed in the attitudes map $(\beta,\alpha )$ defined from regions where the mean lateral force coefficients are significantly decreased by the presence of the rear cavity. In addition, it is found that the steady instability forces the wake to be less unsteady for all attitudes that do not correspond to unsteady transitions.

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The flow around a seal-vibrissa-shaped cylinder (SVSC) is numerically investigated using the large eddy simulation framework at a Reynolds number of 20 000. Compared with a circular cylinder (CC), the wake of the SVSC presents more stable three-dimensional separation, a longer vortex formation length, and a weaker vortex strength. The mean drag and fluctuation of the lift coefficient are 59.5% and 87.7% lower than those of the CC, respectively. Three-dimensional spectral proper orthogonal decomposition (SPOD) is used to investigate the turbulent flow around these two types of cylinders in terms of the spatial modes, mode energy, mode coefficients, and reconstructed flow by a reduced-order modeling. Four typical vortex shedding patterns are first extracted by SPOD for the SVSC, producing crescent-, twist-, branch-, and knot-shaped vortices. A concept model is proposed for the wake dynamics of the SVSC, allowing the formation and transformation of these modes to be elucidated. Detailed analysis of the impact of the flow pattern on the associated forces indicates that the dominant out-phase vortex shedding at the upper and lower saddle planes makes a significant contribution to the reduction in lift fluctuations.

We propose a novel reduced-order model and examine its applicability to the complex three-dimensional turbulent wake of a generic square-backed bluff body called the Ahmed body at Reynolds number Re H = U∞H/ ν =9.2×104 (where U∞ is free-stream velocity, H the height of the body and ν viscosity). Training datasets are obtained by large eddy simulation (LES). The model reduction method consists of two components, a VGG-based hierarchical autoencoder (H-VGG-AE) and a temporal convolutional neural network (TCN). The first step is to map the high-dimensional flow attributes into low-dimensional features, namely latent modes, which are employed as the input for the second step. The TCN is then trained to predict the low-dimensional features in a time series. We compare this method with a TCN based on proper orthogonal decomposition (POD), which utilizes time coefficients as the input in the second part. It turns out that the H-VGG-AE has a lower reconstruction error than POD when the number of latent modes is relatively small in the first part. As the number of latent modes increases, POD exceeds in the performance of model reduction. However, the H-VGG-AE-based TCN is still more effective in terms of spatio-temporal predictions because it has a lower prediction error and costs much less time.