Surging cylinders, flapping wings and gust encounters: Force production in unsteady flows

Professor Holger Babinsky

• 28 October 2024, 18:00 – 19:00
• Bristol-Myers Squibb Lecture Theatre

This event has passed Booking Recommended In-person Lecture Michaelmas Term

• Event cost: Free
• Disabled access?: Yes
• Booking required: No

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Overview

Unsteady effects occur in many natural and technical flows, for example around flapping wings or during aircraft gust encounters. If the unsteadiness is large, the resulting forces can be quite considerable. However, the exact physical mechanisms underlying the generation of unsteady forces are complex and their accurate prediction remains challenging. One strategy is to identify the dominant effects and describe these with simple analytical models, first proposed a hundred years ago. When used successfully, this approach has the advantage that it also gives us a conceptual understanding of unsteady fluid mechanics.  

In this lecture I will explain some of these ideas and demonstrate how they can still be useful today. As a practical example, I will show how the forces experienced in a wing-gust encounter can be predicted – and how the predictions can be used to mitigate the gust effects. The lecture will be illustrated with images and videos from simple, canonical, experiments.
 

Program

Biography

Holger Babinsky originates from Bavaria and studied Aerospace Engineering at Stuttgart University in Germany. He obtained a PhD in hypersonic aerodynamics from Cranfield University (UK) in 1994. After 18 months as Research Associate at the Shock Wave Research Centre of Tohoku University in Sendai (Japan), he returned to the UK to take up a position at the University of Cambridge.

He is now Professor of Aerodynamics in the Engineering Department and Head of Energy, Fluid Mechanics and Turbomachinery as well as a Fellow of Magdalene College.

His main areas of research are in the field of experimental aerodynamics and associated measurement techniques. Apart from supersonic flows, which he has studied for more than 30 years, his research interests include the aerodynamics of micro-air vehicles, road vehicles, aircraft wings and engine inlets. Prof. Babinsky is a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering, the Royal Aeronautical Society and the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics. He is the Editor-in-Chief of the Royal Aeronautical Society’s Aeronautical Journal (the world’s oldest aeronautical journal in production) and an Associate Editor of Experiments in Fluids.

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Larmor Lecture

Sir Joseph Larmor (1857-1942) was Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge from 1903-32. He is particularly known for his work on development of electromagnetic theory. He was a Fellow of the Cambridge Philosophical Society from 1883, Secretary from 1886-1895, President from 1898-1900, and won the Hopkins Prize in 1897.

In his will he bequeathed “£250 to the Cambridge Philosophical Society the income thereof to be used to promote the interest of undergraduate members of the University in the aims of the Society”. He also bequeathed part of his library to CPS.

The first Larmor Lecture was delivered in 1956 by FC Powell (in conjunction with the Physics Society).
 

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Location