The aerodynamics of a stationary wing in a turbulent wake are investigated. Force and velocity measurements are used to describe the unsteady flow. Various wakes are studied with different dominant frequencies and length scales. In contrast to the pre-stall angles of attack, the time-averaged lift increases substantially at post-stall angles of attack as the wing interacts with the von Kármán vortex street and experiences temporal variations of the effective angle of attack. At an optimal offset distance from the wake centreline, the time-averaged lift becomes maximum despite of small amplitude oscillations in the effective angle of attack. The stall angle of attack can reach 20° and the maximum lift coefficient can reach 64 % higher than that in the freestream. Whereas large velocity fluctuations at the wake centreline cause excursions into the fully attached and separated flows during the cycle, small-amplitude oscillations at the optimal location result in periodic shedding of leading edge vortices. These vortices may produce large separation bubbles with reattachment near the trailing-edge. Vorticity roll-up, strength and size of the vortices increase with increasing wavelength and period of the von Kármán vortex street, which also coincides with an increase in the spanwise length scale of the incident wake, and all contribute to the remarkable increase in lift.

We investigate the estimation of the turbulent flow around a canonical square cylinder at $Re=22\,000$ based on temporally resolved but spatially sparse velocity data and solving the unsteady Reynolds-averaged Navier–Stokes (URANS) equations. Flow reconstruction from sparse data is achieved through the application of a nudging data assimilation technique. It involves the introduction of a feedback control term in the momentum equations which allows us to drive URANS predictions towards reference data, which are here extracted from a direct numerical simulation. Such a data assimilation approach induces negligible supplementary computational cost compared with that of a standard URANS simulation. The influence of the spatial resolution of the reference data on the reconstruction performances is systematically investigated. Using a spacing of the order of one cylinder length between data points, we already observe synchronisation of the low-frequency vortex shedding between the full reference flow and the one that is estimated by URANS. The present data assimilation procedure allows us to compensate for deficiencies in standard URANS calculations and leads to a significant decrease in temporal and spectral errors as computed by spectral proper orthogonal decomposition. Furthermore, high accuracy in terms of mean-flow prediction by URANS is achieved. When considering spacings between measurements that are of the order of the wavelength of the Kelvin–Helmholtz vortices, such phenomena in the shear layers at the top and bottom of the cylinder are correctly estimated, while they are not self-sustained in standard URANS. The influence of the structure of the feedback control term in the data assimilation procedure is also investigated.

Direct numerical simulations (DNS) of turbulent channel flows up to ${Re}_{\tau} \approx 1000$ are conducted to investigate the three-dimensional (consisting of streamwise wavenumber, spanwise wavenumber and frequency) spectrum of wall pressure fluctuations. To develop a predictive model of the wavenumber–frequency spectrum from the wavenumber spectrum, the time decorrelation mechanisms of wall pressure fluctuations are investigated. It is discovered that the energy-containing part of the wavenumber–frequency spectrum of wall pressure fluctuations can be well predicted using a similar random sweeping model for streamwise velocity fluctuations. To refine the investigation, we further decompose the spectrum of the total wall pressure fluctuations into the autospectra of rapid and slow pressure fluctuations, and the cross-spectrum between them. We focus on evaluating the assumption applied in many predictive models, that is, the magnitude of the cross-spectrum is negligibly small. The present DNS shows that neglecting the cross-spectrum causes a maximum error up to 4.7 dB in the subconvective region for all Reynolds numbers under test. Our analyses indicate that the approximation of neglecting the cross-spectrum needs to be applied carefully in the investigations of acoustics at low Mach numbers, in which the subconvective components of wall pressure fluctuations make important contributions to the radiated acoustic power.

We explore experimentally whether axisymmetry breaking can be exploited for the open-loop control of a prototypical hydrodynamic oscillator, namely a low-density inertial jet exhibiting global self-excited axisymmetric oscillations. We find that when forced transversely or axially at a low amplitude, the jet always transitions first from a period-1 limit cycle to $\mathbb {T}^2$ quasiperiodicity via a Neimark–Sacker bifurcation. However, we find that the subsequent transition, from $\mathbb {T}^2$ quasiperiodicity to $1:1$ lock-in, depends on the spatial symmetry of the applied perturbations: axial forcing induces a saddle-node bifurcation at small detuning but an inverse Neimark–Sacker bifurcation at large detuning, whereas transverse forcing always induces an inverse Neimark–Sacker bifurcation irrespective of the detuning. Crucially, we find that only transverse forcing can enable both asynchronous and synchronous quenching of the natural mode to occur without resonant or non-resonant amplification of the forced mode, resulting in substantially lower values of the overall response amplitude across all detuning values. From this, we conclude that breaking the jet axisymmetry via transverse forcing is a more effective control strategy than preserving the jet axisymmetry via axial forcing. Finally, we show that the observed synchronization phenomena can be modelled qualitatively with just two forced coupled Van der Pol oscillators. The success of such a simple low-dimensional model in capturing the complex synchronization dynamics of a multi-modal hydrodynamic system opens up new opportunities for axisymmetry breaking to be exploited for the open-loop control of other globally unstable flows.