PHONONIC MATERIALS – AN AVENUE FOR PASSIVE FLOW CONTROL
January 10 @ 3:00 PM - 5:00 PM
Specific modal and non-modal mechanisms (flow coherences) in fluid flows, associated with distinct time and length scales, govern important flow phenomena, e.g., laminar-to-turbulent transition, turbulent drag, and flow separation. Consequently, numerous passive strategies featuring compliant materials have explored the effect of Fluid-structure interaction (FSI) on various flow coherences. In recent years, the emergence of Phononic materials (PMs) with engineered internal architectures provides a powerful tool to encode desired material behavior. Therefore, flow configurations leveraging fluid-PM interaction offer an exciting opportunity to precisely engineer the spatiotemporal scales of the structural response relative to the flow coherences, allowing a more fundamental and systematic study of FSI physics. Initial research efforts adopting the fluid-PM framework have demonstrated effective interaction with flow instabilities, e.g., Tollmien–Schlichting waves. Building on these efforts, our research group explores interesting FSI dynamics of canonical fluid flow – PM configurations to illustrate the potential of PMs for passive flow control.
In this talk, I will present an overview of the PM design strategy and numerical and experimental results from our current fluid-PM interaction research projects. We configure PMs as subsurfaces and explore their FSI with flow coherences in various flow settings, e.g., flow coherences in a turbulent channel flow, Karman vortex streets in a subsonic flow past a cylinder, wake vortices in flow past an airfoil.
Speaker: Dr. Vinod Ramakrishnan
Biography:
Dr. Vinod Ramakrishnan is a Postdoctoral research associate working with Dr. Kathryn Matlack at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His research involves numerical and experimental investigations of Fluid-Metamaterial interaction models to explore avenues for passive flow control. Vinod holds a PhD in Mechanical Engineering from the University of California San Diego (2023) and a B. Tech in Mechanical Engineering from IIT Gandhinagar (2018). He worked with Dr. Michael Frazier during his PhD, where his research explored phase transitions and strategies to control domain walls in multistable metamaterials to promote their adoption in applications, e.g., energy harvesting, mechanical memory devices, and deployable structures.