Effect of curvature on the reconfiguration of flexible blades immersed in incompressible flows*

Marine plants anchored on the ocean floor are exposed to constantly changing ocean currents. In response to the moving flow, their flexible leaves sway rhythmically and so change posture with considerable displacement. This flow-induced deformation arising from nature evolution facilitates aquatic plants to withstand the hydrodynamic loading, also by virtue of the curvature enhanced stiffness behind which there are still open questions. In order to cover this scientific gap, we provide a systematic computational investigation of the reconfiguration of a clamped cylindrical patch by exploring the design space spanned by curvature radius and Cauchy number. The investigation was carried out with an extensively-validated software which employs a partitioned approach to solve Fluid-Structure Interaction (FSI) problems. The fluid field is evolved by means of a finite-difference flow solver with direct immersed boundary forcing, whereas the discretization of the structural domain relies on a NURBS-based Isogeometric method, which has proven to be very efficient in capturing large strain gradients with minimal degrees of freedom. Preliminary results support the capability of curvature-enhanced stiffness to reframe the deformation dynamics of elastic blades.