Proper orthogonal decomposition of wall-pressure fluctuations under the constrained wake of a square cylinder

The proper orthogonal decomposition (POD) analysis of the wall-pressure fluctuations below the constrained wake of a two-dimensional square cylinder in proximity to a plane wall was made on two systems, i.e., G/D = 0.25 and 0.5, which corresponds to the wakes with and without suppression of the vortex shedding, respectively. Here, G is the gap distance and D is the width of the square cylinder. Synchronized measurements of wall-pressure fluctuations were made using a microphone array. For the system G/D = 0.5, the first two energetic modes contribute 34.7% and 23.4% to the total fluctuation energy, respectively; however, the fluctuation energy corresponding to the third mode are relatively small and less than 10%. This sharp variation in eigenvalue is due to the presence and dominance of the Karman-like vortex shedding. However, for the system G/D = 0.25, the considerable reduction in the eigenvalues of the first several modes is due to the suppression of the Karman-like vortex shedding. The spatial wavy pattern of the first several energetic eigenmodes was shown to be a good reflection of convective vortices superimposed in the wakes. The spectra of the POD coefficients determined the frequency of the dominant structures. Based on the coherence of the POD coefficients, an effective method of determining the number of POD modes for reconstruction of the low-order wall-pressure field was proposed. Accordingly, the low-order wall-pressure fluctuations in the systems G/D = 0.5 and 0.25 were reconstructed by using the first four and five POD modes, respectively. The coherence and cross-correlation analysis of the reconstructed wall-pressure fluctuations, which excluded the influence of the small-scale structures and background ‘noise’, gave an insight view of the footprints of the dominant flow structures, which otherwise could not be effectively captured by using the original wall-pressure fluctuations.