Water Entry of a Flexible Wedge with Open and Closed Boundary Conditions

Wedge water entry can be used to study slamming on high-speed craft, seaplane landing, and biological flows such as birds diving into the water. The focus of this talk is on experimental measurements and reduced order modeling from two projects of differing applications: (1) slamming of small craft, where the wedge boundary conditions are closed on all edges, and (2) biologically inspired water entry, where the wedge boundary conditions are opened on all edges but one. For both applications, the flexural rigidity is low such that there are fluid-structure interactions. The difference in boundary conditions strongly affects the amount of deformation seen in the bottom plates of the wedge. Therefore, the flexural rigidity alone is not enough to determine the extent of the fluid-structure interaction. In this talk, the effect of boundary conditions will be discussed and its influence on the hydroelasticity factor, R, will be discussed based on experimental findings backed with theoretical analysis.