Challenges of Investigating Fluid-Elastic Lock-In of a Shallow Cavity and a Cantilevered Beam at Low Mach Numbers

At low flow Mach numbers, fluid-elastic lock-in may occur when a shear layer instability interacts with an adjoining or nearby structure and the resulting vibration of the structure reinforces the shear layer instability. Despite the significant amount of study of lock-in with acoustic resonators, fluid-elastic lock-in of a shear layer fluctuation over a cavity and a structural resonator is not well understood and has not been thoroughly studied. Design of an experimental system is described and preliminary diagnostics are addressed as a basis for a platform for developing a fundamental understanding of the feedback mechanism, analytical models for predicting and describing fluid-elastic lock-in conditions, and the roles of the fluid and structural dynamics in the process. Features of the system investigated here include design for characterization of modal excitation of a beam-like structure from the shear layer fluctuation, isolation of the predominant instability source to the shear layer fluctuation over the cavity, variation of the cavity size to identify critical parameters that govern fluid-elastic lock-in, and alteration of the inflow boundary layer momentum thickness. So far, lock-in between the cavity and the distributed elastic resonator has not been achieved. Further investigations to determine the role of the source and resonator attributes are underway.