Proceedings of 2015 IEEE
International Conference on Mechatronics and Automation
August 2 - 5, Beijing, China
Hydrodynamic Interactions between Two Tandem Flexible
Plates in Viscous Flow
Zhenbo Han, Dibo Dong*, Junkao Liu, Weishan Chen
State Key Laboratory of Robotics and System
Harbin Institute of Technology
Harbin, Heilongjiang Province, China
dongdibo@gmail.com
Abstract - A novel immersed boundary-lattice Boltzmann
method(IB-LBM) is used to model the fluid-structure interaction
problem with biologically flexible structure. In this algorithm,
the fluid parameters are solved by LBM, while the boundary
condition of structure are implemented by IB. Based on this
framework, two tandem flexible plates pined in uniform viscous
flow are simulated. The Reynolds number based on the incoming
velocity and plate's length are fixed at 300 and 500, but the
separation distance are varied in a wide range. Simulation results
show that the flexible plates will flapping passively when the flow
field reach its stability. And the motion characteristic of
downstream plate is strongly influenced by the vortex shedding
from the upstream one. Also, we find the hydrodynamics on the
tandem plates are strongly depended on the separation distance.
As the distance increases, drag on the upstream plate is always
smaller than single one. However, the downstream one will show
two opposite situations. The findings of this work would be
benefit for designing novel underwater robots.
Index Terms - Hydrodynamic interactions. Flexible plates.
Lattice Boltzmann method.
I. INTRODUCTION
Fish schooling is a common phenomenon in nature but
complex in bionic engineering. Swimming fish can take
advantages of the interaction with other fish to save energy
and improve efficiency [1]. Research on fish schooling
behavior has attracted many scholars during the last several
decades. The mechanism of hydrodynamic interaction
between fishes has been studied both experimentally and
numerically. From a hydrodynamic perspective, fishes
swimming in line can be modeled as two-dimensional flexible
plates placed in tandem arrangement. Fish was simplified as a
flapping rigid foil in earlier research, but this ignored the
flexibility of its body, which may cause deviation of the
physical truth. Flexibility was taken into consideration in the
researches in recent years [2], like using flexible plates [3] or
filaments [4,5,6] as model. Reference [7] studied the
interaction of two flexible filaments numerically in a flowing
soap film, and described two flapping mode of the two
filaments: in-phase and anti-phase. Reference [8] investigated
how separation distance between the two filaments influence
on the interaction. Reference [9] experimentally studied the
flapping interactions between two filaments. Coupled flutter
of more than two flexible plates in an axial uniform flow was
investigated in [10]. This study mainly focus on how the
interaction influence on the drag experienced by two tandem
978-1-4799-7098-8/15/$31.00 ©2015 IEEE
flexible plates, and the mechanism. In this paper, we use
flexible plates for the models to study the hydrodynamic
characteristic of the tandem flexible objects by the Immersed
Boundary – Lattice Boltzmann method. The rest of this paper
is organized as follows. The numerical algorithm and physical
model are presented in section II. Detailed simulation results
are discussed in section III and concluding remarks are drawn
in section IV.
II. COMPUTATIONAL MODEL
In this work, two flexible plates arranged in tandem in
two-dimensional viscous flow as shown in Fig. 1. The velocity
of the incoming flow U∞ is uniform, along the X- axis
direction. L is the chord length of the plates. Separation
distance between the plates D decides the relative position of
them. Heads of the two plates are fixed and the boundary
conditions for the free ends are considered at the tails. The
model of two tandem flexible plates in a two-dimensional
viscous flow is calculated by the immersed boundary – lattice
Boltzmann method, which discretizes the fluid with a regular
Cartesian lattice. The moving flexible objects are discretized
by a group of markers on Lagrangian coordinate. The fluid
and structure are solved individually, interactions between
them are considered by introducing a momentum force.
The Navier–Stokes equations used in IB-LBM and
continuity equation to describe the viscous fluid are:
⎛ ∂u ⎞ 1 2
ρf⎜ + ui∇u ⎟ + ∇p − ∇ u = fib , (1)
⎝ ∂t ⎠ Re
∇iu = 0 . (2)
Where Re is the Reynolds number, defined as Re = U ∞ L / μ ,
μ is the Dynamic viscosity of the fluid. ρf represents the fluid
density, p is the pressure, u = (u, v) is the velocity vector,
which is a function of time t. The momentum forcing is
represented by fib = (fx, fy), which ensures no-slip boundary
condition in the IB-LBM. Equations (1) and (2) are solved by
a fractional step method on the staggered Cartesian grid [6], fib
is obtained by:
1
fib ( x, t ) = Φds,
Δt
(3)
⎛ ⎞
Φ = ∫ ⎜ U d ( X( s ), t ) − ∫ u p (y )δ ( y − X( s)dy ) ⎟δ ( x − X( s ) ) .
Γ⎝ Ω ⎠
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Fig. 1 Schematic diagram of two tandem plates in viscous flow.
Γ is the boundary of the Lagrangian markers which represents
the structure, and Ω denotes the computational domain of
fluid. s is a parametric coordinate defined along Γ. X is the
Lagrangian marker location. Ud represents the target velocity
value obtained at time step completion at X. up is the velocity
field of the fluid obtained from the Lattice Boltzmann
equations [5]. δ is a mollifier defined in [11] to perform the
convolution in (3). Fib is the force exerted by the plates on the
fluid which defined on each marker, the correlation between
Fib and its lattice counterpart fib that reads:
Fib( X) = ∫ fib( x)δ ( x − X) dV .
Ω
V refers to the volume of the particles on the lattice. The
equation describes the motion of the plates reads:
d 2 X d ⎛ dX ⎞ d 4X
ms = ⎜ T c ⎟ − K B − Fib = 0 .
dt 2 ds ⎝ ds ⎠ ds 4
The non-dimensional variables used in (5) are: mass ratio
ms is defined as ms = ρs / ρf L, ρs is the linear density of the
plate. The bending rigidity KB = EI / ( ρ fU ∞2 L3 ) , EI is the
elasticity modulus of the material. Force tension coefficient
Tc = T / ρ fU ∞2 L , T is the tension force along the flexible plate.
Due to the small thickness of the plate compared to its chord
length, the plates are considered inextensible, which provided
by the equation:
dX dX
⋅ =1.
ds ds
The boundary condition for the fixed end is:
d 2X
X = X 0, = 0.
ds 2
The boundary condition for the free end is:
d 2X
T = 0, =0.
ds 2
The non-dimensional drag coefficient is defined as
C D = 2 FD / ρU ∞2 L , FD is the average drag experienced by the
plate. The flapping amplitude of the plates AT is defined as the
amplitude along the Y-axis of the free end of the plates, and
the dimensionless flapping amplitude A is defined as A = AT /
L. The length of the plates L = 50 (the distance between two
adjacent markers is set to 1). The size of the computational
domain for the fluid is set to 40L along the streamwise
direction and 40L along the transverse direction, therefore the
Eulerian grid size for the fluid domain is 2000 × 2000. Initial
position of the plates are shown in Fig. 2 , the initial angle of
the plate is set to φ = 6°, and the fixed end of the plate is
placed at the center line of the computational domain. The
Reynolds number is set to 300 and 500. Mass ratio and
bending rigidity is set to ms = 0.3 and KB = 0.001 in all the
simulations in this paper. We mainly analyze the influence of
the separation distance by changing D form 0.1L to 5.0L, here
we introduce the separation distance ratio DL defined as
DL = D / L .
We conduct the simulations over dozens of flapping
periods after the flapping motion is stable, and all the results
analyzed are obtained by these stable periods.
III. RESULT AND DISCUSSION
The drag coefficient CD of two tandem plates as a
function of the separation distance ratio DL is plotted in Fig. 3.
We can observe from the plots that in most cases, drag on the
upstream plate is smaller than that of its neighbor, similar
(4)
result for tandem flexible objects has been reported in [12].
For Re = 300 , in the range DL is less than 3.0, the upstream
plate experiences obvious drag reduction, compared with the
case of a single plate, and the reduction can be 12% at most.
For 3.0 ≤ DL ≤ 5.0, drag on the upstream plate almost
approaches to the single plate case. For Re = 500, there is no
(5)
obviously drag reduction for upstream plate, except the
separation distance is very small for DL ≤ 0.3. For most cases
of Re = 300 and Re = 500, drag on the downstream plate is
significantly larger than that of the upstream one, but for 1.1 ≤
DL ≤ 1.2 at Re = 300, drag on the downstream plate is even less
than its neighbor. At DL = 1.0, the drag coefficient drops
sharply, and starts to increases at the minimum value, this
makes the curve presents a shape of "V", Reference [13] has
reported similar result. For Re = 500, there is no such
obviously drag reduction for the downstream plate, the drag
coefficient of it also appears two small sunken range at 0.5 ≤
DL ≤ 1.0 and 1.1 ≤ DL ≤ 1.7, but it is not so obvious as the case
(6)
Re = 300. At 4.0 ≤ DL ≤ 5.0, CD of the downstream plate at Re
= 500 doesn't decline obviously, and is still much larger than
the CD of the upstream plate. Both CD curves of the tandem
plates for Re = 500 are relatively smooth. According to the
(7) trend of the CD for Re = 300, we divide the plot into 4 regions,
as shown in Fig. 3(a). In region I, the upstream plate
experiences obvious drag reduction, it seems when the two
plates are close to each other, drag on both plates decreased. In
region III, CD of the upstream plate is relatively stable, but CD
(8) of the downstream one experiences a significant change. In
region VI, as the separation distance increasing, influence of
each plates becomes weaker, and drag on both plates
approaches to the single plate case.
Fig. 2 Initial position of the flapping plate, the y-position of the tail is
monitored.
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 Drag coefficient (CD)

Separation distance ratio (DL) Separation distance ratio (DL)

(a) (b)
Fig. 3 Drag coefficient CD versus separation distance ratio DL, for (a) Re = 300, (b) Re = 500.

To analyze the mechanism of the drag fluctuate, we chose
two cases of DL = 0.5 and DL = 1.1 in the region I and II. The
flapping pattern of the plates of the two cases are shown in
Fig. 4. We can see the flapping amplitude of the downstream
plate is larger than the upstream one at DL = 0.5, but the
difference of flapping amplitudes are much less in the case at
DL = 1.1. The amplitudes of the two cases have the same
tendency with drag. There is a proportional relationship
between drag and amplitude, if flapping amplitude increases,
drag would increases too [14]. We can infer that the drag
reduction or increase of the downstream plate may be caused
by the interactions of vortex shedding from the upstream one.
Vortex reaches the downstream plate along the flow, and
restrains or promotes the flapping motion of the downstream
plate, which leads to drag changes.
As shown in Fig. 3, drag on the upstream plate decreases at a
short distance. For two tandem flexible objects, the exists of
the downstream one can be regarded as a wake splitter and a
barrier, it serves to suppress lateral flow of its upstream
neighbor and inhibits the motion of the upstream one [14],
which leads to a drag reduction. More closer the upstream
plate to the suppressed flow area, much more significant the
drag reduction is.
From Fig. 4 and Fig. 5, we can see flapping pattern of the
downstream plate is not absolutely symmetrical along the
centre line, the flapping motion deviates to one flank, similar
situation can be found in [12]. Motion locus and phase plot of
Y-velocity with Y-coordinate of tail at Re = 300, DL = 0.5 are
plotted in Fig. 5. Specially, the zero points of X-coordinate of
tail in Fig. 5 (a) and (b) are set at each head of the plate.

(a) (b)
Fig. 4 Flapping pattern of the tandem plates at Re = 300, for (a) DL = 0.5, (b) DL = 1.1.

(a) (b) (c) (d)

Fig. 5 The trajectory and phase plot of tail point at Re = 300, DL = 0.5 for (a, c) upstream plate and (b, d) downstream plate.

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We can see the motion locus of the tail of the plates clearly
from Fig. 5 (a) and (b), tail locus of the upstream plate is
symmetrical about the centre line, but for the downstream
plate, the tail locus deviates to one side, and both the
amplitudes along X-axis and Y axis are larger than that of
upstream plate. Fig. 5 (c) and (d) shows the phase plot
represents the relation between Y-velocity and Y-coordinate
of the tail. The phase plot trace out a closed line when the
flapping motion is stable. Phase plot of upstream plate is oval,
which shows the Y-velocity is symmetrical about the tail
displacement.
As shown in Fig. 6 (a) and (b), the two plates share the
same dominant frequency, and there are several
inconspicuous peaks in frequency spectrum of the downstream
plate. We find that the tandem plates always share the same
dominant flapping frequency no matter how the separation
distance changes. Time evolution of CD and time evolution of
Amplitude (L)
Frequency (rad V/L)
(a)
Fig. 6 Frequency spectrum of flapping motion of tail for (a) DL = 0.5, (b) DL = 1.1.
Drag coefficient (CD)
Time (L/V)
(a)
Tail position (L)
Time (L/V)
(c)
Fig. 7 Drag coefficient CD and y-coordinate of tail versus separation distance ratio DL at Re = 300, for (a, c) DL = 0.5, (b, d) DL = 1.1.
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the y-coordinate of the free ends are shown in Fig. 7, we can
see that when displacement of the free ends almost reach
maximum, CD will reach its peak, and when the displacement
of the free ends approach to zero, CD will reach its minimum.
Time evolution of CD of the upstream plate represents the
shape of a sine curve, but CD of the downstream plate is kind
of out-of-shape. Time evolution of CD of the downstream plate
shows that when the displacement of the free end near
maximum of each flank, the corresponding maximum drag on
the downstream plate is different.
Point A to F in Fig. 7 corresponding to the minimum
value of CD, two peak values of CD at DL = 0.5 and DL = 1.1
respectively. For the case DL = 0.5, drag at point B is less than
that at point C, and the displacements at point B and C are the
same situation. Two peak points of CD E and F at DL = 1.1 are
both smaller than that of DL = 0.5.
Frequency (rad V/L)
(b)
Time (L/V)
(b)
Time (L/V)
(d)
 Flapping motion of the downstream plate shows a
asymmetry compared with its neighbour, we can find the
reason in the vorticity contours of it which is shown in Fig. 8.
The vortex shedding by the upstream plates have a strong
influence on the downstream one. Vortex have two kinds,
clockwise and counter-clockwise vortices, which are
generated in turn at each flank of the plate. Vortex will suck
the plate to their core. Vorticity contours of DL = 0.5 shows,
when the downstream plate encounters clockwise vortex, it is
at the motion of moving away from the vortex. Fig. 8 (a)
shows, when the vortex has passed almost half of the plate, tail
of the plate reaches the maximum displacement of the other (a)
side, and begins to move back, the same direction that the
clockwise vortex sucks the downstream plate. Before the tail
reaches the maximum displacement, the clockwise vortex
leaves the tail. We can see from Fig. 8, the clockwise vortex
almost separate with the plate. But when the downstream plate
encounters the counter-clockwise vortex, the plate is much
closer to it. The counter-clockwise vortex has a stronger
influence on the downstream plate for the case DL = 0.5,
which leads to the asymmetry of flapping motion.
Now we will focus on the mechanism of drag increase or
decrease on the downstream plate by analysing the interaction
between the tandem plates. Vorticity contours of DL = 0.5 and (b)
Fig. 8 Vorticity contours of downstream plate at Re = 300, DL = 0.5: (a) the
DL = 1.1 at point A at F (plotted in Fig. 7) are shown in Fig. 9. clockwise vortex, (b) the counter-clockwise vortex.

(a) (d)

(b) (e)

(c) (f)
Fig. 9 Vorticity contours at points A to F (plotted in Fig. 7): (a) point A, (b) point B, (c) point C, (d) point D, (e) point E, (f) point F.

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 we can see the vorticity contours at points A, B and C for
the case DL = 0.5 from Fig. 9, while a counter-clockwise
vortex of the downstream plate is generating, the counter-
clockwise vortex shedding by the upstream one arrivals, and
the clockwise vortex at the other side of the plate almost
separates from the downstream plate. Two vortex of same
direction of rotation encounter which increase the vorticity at
the one flank of the downstream plate, and the opposite vortex
at the other flank has no strong influence on the plate, which
lead to a larger flapping amplitude. The situation for
clockwise vortex is the same, two clockwise vortex encounter
and also increase the flapping amplitude of the downstream
plate. But for the case DL = 1.1, the vortex shedding by the
upstream plate always encounters the vortex with reverse
direction of rotation which is generating by the downstream
plate. The vorticity contours at points D, E and F shows two
opposite vortex at each side of the downstream plate, which
suck the plate to their cores at the same time. Two opposite
vortex decrease flapping amplitude, which leads to a drag
decrease of the downstream plate.
For flexible objects arranged in tandem in a viscous flow,
the separation distance has a strong influence on the
hydrodynamic characteristic of them. In some specific flow
condition and distance, drag on the objects can be reduced to
save energy.
IV. CONCLUSION
We numerically investigate the hydrodynamic
interactions of two flexible plates arranged in tandem in a
uniform flow using the Immersed Boundary – Lattice
Boltzmann method. The analysis focus mainly on changing
the separation distance between the tandem plates at Reynolds
number of 300 and 500. We find drag on the tandem plates
strongly depends on the separation distance. The flapping
patterns of the downstream plate is not fully symmetric, the
vortex shedding by the upstream plate has a interference on its
motion, this leads to the deviation of motion. The upstream
plate experiences drag reduction in most cases, existing of the
downstream plate can be regard as a wake splitter and barrier,
which inhibits its motion and leads to the drag reduction. Drag
on the downstream plate has two different situations. In most
cases, the downstream plate suffers a drag increase, but at
some specific distance, drag on it is less than that on a single
plate, namely 'drag reduction'. By analysing the drag
coefficient as a function of time, frequency spectrum of the
flapping amplitude and the vorticity contours of the tandem
plates, we found the two opposite situations is due to the
interaction between the downstream plate and the vortices
shedding by the upstream one. In some specific situations,
drag on both plates could be reduced, this mechanism could
help take advantages of the interactions of tandem flexible
bodies. This work would be help us to understand the flow
control mechanism in fish swimming, moreover it would
inspire us to improve the performance of existing marine
equipment or create novel underwater vehicles.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
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This work was made possible by grants from the National
Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 50905040), the
Foundation for the Author of National Excellent Doctoral
Dissertation of China (No.201428), and the Fundamental
Research Funds for the Central Universities.
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