Yu Nishio

Abstract This study numerically investigates an early stage of nonlinear interaction for the better understanding of the onset of nonlinear behaviors. Two-dimensional shear flow is chosen as a canonical flow. When two disturbances of different wavenumbers satisfying no resonance condition are initially given, new components appear one after another while the original disturbances grow. The vorticity budget analysis shows that the beat of the two exciting modes plays an essential role in forming the sum and difference nonlinear components, namely the secondary modes. For the nonlinear interaction mechanism, the high vorticity around the center of the shear layer is locally transported in the transverse direction at specific streamwise sections where the amplitude of the vertical velocity fluctuation becomes relatively larger compared to other sections. The distance between these specific sections corresponds to the wavelength of the beat. The vertically dispersed vorticity will then be convected in the horizontal directions by the mean flow. As a result, several regions of concentrated vorticity appear which eventually develop into vortices. The amplification mechanism is found to be the same for both the primary and secondary modes, though the secondary modes arise from the additional perturbation deriving from the initial perturbation.

<title>Abstract</title> Micro air vehicles (MAVs) have been developed for many fields. The MAVs usually receive strong impact from a velocity change in time or space, and facilities for aerodynamic experiments of MAVs under a gusty environment have been required. The present study has developed a gust wind tunnel to generate unsteady and non-uniform flows. We developed a small wind tunnel with eight multi-fans and a shutter mechanism at the upstream of the test section. We controlled the outputs of the fans independently and obtained a linear shear layer with an error of 5 percent. The velocity gradient of the shear layer was from 5 to 8 s−1. The shutter mechanisms provided a longitudinal gust with the velocity change from 2 m/s to 10 m/s within 0.3 seconds.