Towards the Understanding of Humpback Whale Tubercles: Linear Stability Analysis of a Wavy Flat Plate

Abstract

The results from a temporal linear stability analysis of a subsonic boundary layer over a flat plate with a straight and wavy leading edge are presented in this paper for a swept and un-swept plate. For the wavy leading-edge case, an extensive study on the effects of the amplitude and wavelength of the waviness was performed. Our results show that the wavy leading edge increases the critical Reynolds number for both swept and un-swept plates. For the un-swept plate, increasing the leading-edge amplitude increased the critical Reynolds number, while changing the leading-edge wavelength had no effect on the mean flow and hence the flow stability. For the swept plate, a local analysis at the leading-edge peak showed that increasing the leading-edge amplitude increased the critical Reynolds number asymptotically, while the leading-edge wavelength required optimization. A global analysis was subsequently performed across the span of the swept plate, where smaller leading-edge wavelengths produced relatively constant critical Reynolds number profiles that were larger than those of the straight leading edge, while larger leading-edge wavelengths produced oscillating critical Reynolds number profiles. It was also found that the most amplified wavenumber was not affected by the wavy leading-edge geometry and hence independent of the waviness.