Scaling laws for drag of a compliant body in an incompressible viscous flow

Abstract

Motivated by an important discovery on the drag scaling law (the 4/3 power law) of a flexible fibre in a flowing soap film by Albenet al. (Naturevol. 420, 2002, p.479) at high Reynolds numbers (2000<Re<40000), we investigate drag scaling laws at moderateRefor a compliant fibre tethered at the midpoint and submerged in an incompressible viscous flow using the immersed boundary (IB) method. Our work shows that the scaling of drag with respect to oncoming flow speed varies withRe, and the exponents of the power laws decrease monotonically from approximately 2 towards 4/3 asReincreases from 10 to 800.