What is the simplest fluid/structure system with chaotic behavior?

What is it about?

Chaos occurs when a system is so sensitive to small changes that its future behavior can not be predicted with any reliability. However, chaos is not dependent on complexity - and exploring simple chaotic systems can lead to greater insight. This paper investigates the motion of an elliptical body that rotates freely around its tow-point. The response of the ellipse is found to vary from simple periodic motion to completely chaotic motion depending on the location of the pivot.

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Why is it important?

This paper presents the simplest fluid/structure system which is known to result in chaotic motions. As such it enables an analytic investigation to isolate the sources of nonlinearity and compare them to 'toy' chaotic systems. It also enables first-principle numerical simulations to isolate the dependance on fluid and structural damping. Chaotic energy harnessing devices and chaotic sensors offer a number of interesting applications of the findings in this paper.