In the context of dam breaks, tsunami, and flash floods, it is paramount to quantify the time-history of forces by the rapidly transient flow to vertical structures and the characteristics of the induced flow patterns. To resemble on-land tsunami-induced flow, a free-surface-piercing structure is exposed to long leading depression waves in a tsunami flume where long waves run up and down a 1:40...

This paper deals with a variational model applicable to small-deformation structural analysis expressed for linearly elastic-perfectly plastic (von Mises-Hubcr-Hencky) material. The model comprises a unification of the minimum complementary energy principal, the Haar-von Karman principle for deformation elastoplasticity, and (in a sense) the lower bound theorem of Limit Analysis. Thus it corres...

We model the swimming of a finite body in a vortex street using vortex sheets distributed along the body and in a wake emanating from its trailing edge. We determine the magnitudes and distributions of vorticity and pressure loading on the body as functions of the strengths and spacings of the vortices. We then consider the motion of a flexible body clamped at its leading edge in the vortex str...

Vortex control is a new paradigm in fluid mechanics, with applications to propulsion and wake reduction. A heaving and pitching hydrofoil placed in a flow with an array of oncoming vortices can achieve a very high propulsive efficiency and reduced wake signature. The canonical example of flow with regular arrays of vortices is the Krman vortex street, and this is our model for the inflow to the...

A stochastic model is derived to predict the turbulent torque produced by a swirling flow. It is a simple Langevin process, with a colored noise. Using the unified colored noise approximation, we derive analytically the PDF of the fluctuations of injected power in two forcing regimes: constant angular velocity or constant applied torque. In the limit of small velocity fluctuations and vanishing...