Abstract

Unsteady effects occur in many natural and technical flows, for example around flapping wings or during air vehicle 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 continue to challenge our understanding of such flows. One strategy to improve our insight is to identify the dominant effects and describe these with low-order force models. A popular approach is to group forces into circulatory (e.g. vortex lift or bound circulation) and non-circulatory (added-mass).
Although the concept of added mass has been around for more than a century and is superficially simple, its details continue to confound and confuse. In this talk I will re-visit the definition of added mass and propose a methodology to identify it experimentally. I will demonstrate this on a series of simple, canonical, experiments and then answer some open questions about the concept and applicability of added mass.

Speaker’s Bio

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 shock-wave/boundary-layer interactions, which he has studied for almost 30 years, his current research interests include the aerodynamics of micro-air vehicles, road vehicles and flow control for transonic aircraft wings and supersonic engine inlets. He is the Editor-in-Chief of the Royal Aeronautical Society’s Aeronautical Journal (the world’s oldest aeronautical journal in production), a Fellow of the Royal Aeronautical Society, an Associate Fellow of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, and an Associate Editor of Experiments in Fluids.