Experimental Study on Physical Behavior of Fluidic Oscillator in a Confined Cavity with Sudden Expansion

Abstract

In this study, two-dimensional time-resolved particle image velocimetry (2D-TR-PIV) was used to investigate the effect of the external domain on oscillating jets from double-feedback fluidic oscillators. Two different cases with different Re numbers (2680–10,730), as free external domain and fully confined were studied. Time-averaged results showed although a self-oscillating jet was attained for the free external domain, it could not be achieved for a fully confined geometry. For a fully confined geometry at Re = 2680, two symmetric vortices did not allow the jet to oscillate and at Re = 6440, the flow pattern in the external region became non-symmetric due to the Coanda vortex, subsequently, the self-oscillating jet was not observed. At Re = 10,730, the strength of the jet was inclined to cope with such vortices and tended to oscillate. However, strong vortices were created near the exit region of the fluidic oscillator, which led to an almost non-symmetric pattern. In addition, the proper orthogonal decomposition (POD) method and phase-averaged analysis were applied to obtain the unsteady behavior of flow and the most energetic dynamic structure. Interestingly, at Re = 6440, the third mode was still energetic for fully confined, but for other cases, the first two modes were the most energetic modes, which showed vigorous coherent structures.