The Force Partitioning Method: A Data-Enabled Method for Dissecting Vortex Dominated Flows

Abstract Pressure on a body immersed in a flow is induced simultaneously by vortices, acceleration reaction (a.k.a. added mass) effects associated with body and/or flow acceleration, and viscous diffusion of momentum, and determining the relative importance of these different mechanisms remains one of the most important and fundamental issues in fluid dynamics. Pressure-induced drag and lift are key to the performance of wings, rotors and propellers; undulating fins and flapping wings generate pressure-induced forces that are key to locomotion in fish, birds and insects; time-varying fluid dynamic forces drive flutter and flow-induced vibrations of flexible structures in engineering and biology, and these same forces enable the extraction of energy from flow via devices such as wind-turbines. Professor Mittal will describe the force partitioning method (FPM), a data-enabled method that partitions pressure forces into components due to vorticity, acceleration reaction and viscous diffusion. FPM has been used to gain new insights into a variety of vortex dominated flows including dynamic stall in pitching foils, vortex-induced vibration of bluff-bodies, locomotion of carangiform swimmers and rough-wall boundary layers, and results from these analyses will be presented. Finally, FPM has been extended to aeroacoustics, and applications of the aeroacoustic partitioning method (APM) to dissect aeroacoustic noise in engineering and biological flows will be presented.  

Rajat Mittal is Professor of Mechanical Engineering at the Johns Hopkins University with a secondary appointment in the School of Medicine. He received the B. Tech. degree from the Indian Institute of Technology at Kanpur in 1989, the M.S degree in Aerospace Engineering from the University of Florida, and the Ph.D. degree in Applied Mechanics from The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, in 1995. His research interests include computational fluid dynamics, vortex dominated flows, biomedical engineering, biological fluid dynamics, fluid-structure interaction, and flow control. He has published over 200 technical articles on these topics and holds multiple patents in associated technologies. He is the recipient of the 1996 Francois Frenkiel and the 2022 Stanley Corrsin Awards from the Division of Fluid Dynamics of the American Physical Society (APS), and the 2006 Lewis Moody as well as 2021 Freeman Scholar Awards from the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME). He is an associate editor of the Journal of Computational Physics, Frontiers of Computational Physiology and Medicine, the Journal of Experimental Biology, and the International Journal for Numerical Methods in Biomedical Engineering.