Hydrodynamics of pitching hydrofoil in a plane Poiseuille flow

Several advanced medical and engineering tasks, such as microsurgery, drug delivery through arteries, pipe inspection, and sewage cleaning, can be more efficiently handled using micro- and nano-robots. Pressure-driven flows are commonly encountered in these practical scenarios. In our current research, we delve into the hydrodynamics of pitching hydrofoils within narrow channels, which may find their potential applications in designing bio-inspired robots capable of navigating through pressure-driven flows in confined channels. In this paper, we have conducted a numerical investigation into the flow characteristics of a National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) 0012 hydrofoil pitching around its leading edge within a plane Poiseuille flow using a graphical processing unit accelerated sharp interface immersed boundary method solver. Our study considers variations of the wall clearance from 20% to 50% of the channel width. We have explored the hydrodynamic features such as instantaneous and time-averaged values of lift, drag, input power, and torque for different wall clearance ratios and oscillation frequencies in the range of Reynolds number 100–200 based on the mean velocity and channel width. We have tried to explain the force, torque, and power variations by examining the flow features in the near wake. While the hydrodynamic coefficients showed significant variations with changes in wall clearance and the Strouhal number (St), we did not observe significant variations with alterations in the Reynolds number (Re).