The origin of hysteresis in the flag instability
Fluid Dynamics
2012-04-30 v1
Abstract
The flapping flag instability occurs when a flexible cantilevered plate is immersed in a uniform airflow. To this day, the nonlinear aspects of this aeroelastic instability are largely unknown. In particular, experiments in the literature all report a large hysteresis loop, while the bifurcation in numerical simulations is either supercritical or subcritical with a small hysteresis loop. In this paper, this discrepancy is addressed. First weakly nonlinear stability analyses are conducted in the slender-body and two-dimensional limits, and second new experiments are performed with flat and curved plates. The discrepancy is attributed to inevitable planeity defects of the plates in the experiments.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1109.4196,
title = {The origin of hysteresis in the flag instability},
author = {Christophe Eloy and Nicolas Kofman and Lionel Schouveiler},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1109.4196},
year = {2012}
}