Alexandria Engineering Journal (2019) 58, 1367–1374

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Alexandria University

Alexandria Engineering Journal

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ORIGINAL ARTICLE

The ability of forecasting flapping frequency of

flexible filament by artificial neural network
M. Fayed a,b, M. Elhadary b,*, H. Ait Abderrahmane c, Bassem Nashaat Zakher d

a
College of Engineering and Technology, American University of the Middle East, Kuwait
b
Department of Mechanical Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, Alexandria University, Egypt
c
Khalifa University of Science and Technology, Masdar Institute, Masdar City, P.O. Box 54224, Abu Dhabi,
United Arab Emirates
d
Pharos University in Alexandria (PUA), Mechanical Department, Alexandria, Egypt

Received 28 August 2019; revised 6 November 2019; accepted 13 November 2019

Available online 27 November 2019

KEYWORDS Abstract Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) are reliable and computationally inexpensive
Flapping frequency; compared to numerical methods such as CFD simulations and experimental investigations in
Artificial neural network aerodynamics research. In this article, an Artificial Neural Network (ANN) has been introduced to
(ANN); predict the flapping frequencies of a filament placed in a 2-D soap-film tunnel. The multi-layer
Flexible filament perception (MLP) networks have been used in developing the Artificial Neural Network while the
backpropagation Levenberg-Marquardt algorithm was used to perform the training of the ANN.
A part of the experimental data was considered for the training process while the rest for the prediction
test of the suggested ANN. The ANN results indicate that it can predict the frequencies of the periodic
flapping with good accuracy. However, it fails when the flapping presents amplitude modulation.
Ó 2019 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. on behalf of Faculty of Engineering, Alexandria
University. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/
licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).

1. Introduction established that aerodynamic coefficients can be identify using

The capabilities of Artificial neural networks (ANNs) in pre-
dicting drag coefficients, unsteady development, separation
and reattachment of the boundary layer, steady and unsteady
aero dynamic load and airfoil harmonics oscillations are pro-
ven [1]. Linse and Stengle [2] used a Computational Neural
Network to derive aerodynamic coefficient models using the
simulated flight-test data for a twin-jet transport aircraft. They
* Corresponding author.
E-mail address: mostafaelhadary@yahoo.com (M. Elhadary).
Peer review under responsibility of Faculty of Engineering, Alexandria
University.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.aej.2019.11.007
1110-0168 Ó 2019 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. on behalf of Faculty of Engineering, Alexandria University.
This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).
neural networks.
Artificial Neural Networks are applied for the flight control
applications and the identification of dynamical systems due to
their ability to approximate general continuous nonlinear
functions [3–5]. Rakotomamonjy et al. [6] used experimental
results of hummingbird and insects flapping flight to develop
a flight dynamics simulation model for flapping-wing micro
air vehicles. They introduced a neural network to model the
movements of the wing by imitating numerous function shape.
McCracken [7] aimed to solve the Navier-Stokes Equations for
turbulence by applying the neural network to detect, based on
3-dimensional inputs, ionospheric velocity fields. The neural
network succeeded to map the velocity fields within a 67%
1368
Nomenclature
List of symbols
L filament length (mm)
N the number of output nodes
precision of the testing data used. Khezzar et al. [8] designed
an artificial neural network model to predict the reattachment
length for laminar flow. They demonstrated that, for a limited
choice of Reynolds numbers, computational fluid dynamics
(CFD) can be used in the first instance to obtain reattachment
lengths and ANN will be used for other intermediate Reynolds
number values. Awad et al. [9] applied the performance and
robustness of a proposed control system based on neural net-
work approach to active fins that takes into account roll
response spectral characteristics transitions due to not only
varying sea state but also changing sailing conditions is
assessed. Babikir et al. [10] presented a new model that com-
posed of an Artificial Neural Network (ANN) integrated with
a hybrid algorithm consists of Cat Swarm Optimization (CSO)
and Firefly Algorithm (FA) algorithms to predict the noise of a
submersible Axial Piston Pump (APP) for different valve seat
materials.
In the present study, we test the ability of an ANN model in
predicting the filament flapping frequencies in a two-
dimensional soap-film tunnel. The Neural Networks Toolbox
of the MATLAB software with backpropagation Levenberg-
Marquardt algorithm [11] has been used to develop the
ANN model. This is considered as a canonical experimental
model of fluid-structures interactions problem, which occurs
in several industrial and natural situations. These include soft
plate vibration in snoring, plant leaf’s oscillation, heat
exchangers with parallel-plate-type vibration, flags fluttering,
web vibration in paper-making [12].
Fig. 1 (a) A Schematic of the experimental setup; (b) raw snapshots of the flapping filament in the soap film tunnel; (c) superposition of
the successive positions of the filament.
M. Fayed et al.
di target values for output node i
oi model values for output node i
p input/output patterns training number
V flow speed (m/s)
2. Experiments
The experiments were conducted in vertical gravity-driven
flowing soap film tunnel; Fig. 1a. A nozzle from a reservoir
was designed to supply the soapy solution, while the planar
soap film was obtained by spreading and guiding the soapy
water via two taut nylon threads of 1 mm in diameter, which
are spaced by 100 mm from each other.
The soapy water was pumped into the reservoir with aid of
a gear pump. To fix film thickness and the flow rate in the test
section, the fluid height in the reservoir was kept constant. The
reservoir inhibits the flow perturbations due to the pump. The
filament of various lengths was placed within the soap film,
hold by a needle. The filament should be placed where the flow
reached its terminal velocity with constant thickness, so it was
placed sufficiently far downstream from the nozzle. The flow
velocity was measured by tracking a small droplet of dye trans-
ported by the flow; see Fig. 2a(i) and a(ii). This value of the
velocity has been verified by tracking the center of vortices
shed by the flapping filament when sodium light is used and
the very small air bubbles present in the soap film [13].
To visualize the flow, the light source was placed in front of
the test section. The filament flapping motion was logged at a
frame rate of 800 fps using a camera of high speed. A sample
of series snapshots, depicting a half period of a 35-flapping
cycle of the flapping filament, is shown in Fig. 1b. The gray
represents the background of the owing soap film while the
filament is in black. To extract the flapping dynamics of the
The ability of forecasting flapping frequency of flexible filament 1369

3. The Artificial neural network to forecast the flapping motions

3.1. Artificial neural networks

The main components of ANN are the input, the hidden and
output layers. The back-propagation training algorithm is
commonly used to iteratively minimize the following cost func-
tion concerning the interconnection weights and neurons
thresholds [14,15]:

Fig. 2 Experimental details: (a) flow-speed measurement tech-

nique, (b) flapping filament, and (c) wake behind a flapping
filament when using low-sodium light [13].

filaments we used an image processing algorithm, implemented

in MATLAB environment; Fig. 1c.
The flapping dynamics of the filament depends on two con-
trol parameters namely, the length of the filament and the flow
velocity. In this study we have considered filaments of different
lengths: 40, 50, 60, 80, and 100 mm. The flow speeds were
ranging from 4.2 m/s to 8.7 m/s. In these conditions, we did
not observe interference in the soap film illuminated by a
low-pressure sodium light. For higher speed values, fluctua-
tions will be generated in the soap film and the flow condition
will change from subcritical to supercritical [13]. On the other
hand at a speed less than 4.2 the filament will not fluctuate at
any filament length. A time series sample of the filament free
end displacement and its power spectral density is shown in
Fig. 3. These two figures indicate that the flapping of the fila-
ment is periodic with the fundamental frequency (f = 35.94
Hz). The other peaks in the power spectrum are the harmonics Fig. 4 Neural network architecture (test 1); NMSE for each
of the fundamental frequency. number of neurons in the hidden layer.

Fig. 3 Time series and fast Fourier transform of the filament flapping dynamic. The filament is 50 mm long placed in owing with a speed
of 4.25 m/s.
1370 M. Fayed et al.

L =40 mm L =80 mm

L =60 mm
L =100 mm

Fig. 5 FFNN Simulations for (a) L = 40 mm, (b) L = 60 mm (c) L = 80 mm (d) L = 100 mm.

Fig. 6 FFNN Simulations for L = 50 mm.

1 Xp XN 3.1.1. Tests
E¼ ðdi  oi Þ2 ð1Þ
2 i¼1 i¼1
The ability to forecasting the flapping motion was investigated
In the present study, when the normalized-mean-square- with two different tests and with two different techniques. In
error (NMSE) between the ANN outputs and the tested data the first test, the inputs of the neural network were the filament
for all elements in the training set has established the target length and flow speed while the flapping frequency was the sin-
value, the training process is finished. gle output of the network. In the second test, there were three
The ability of forecasting flapping frequency of flexible filament
inputs: filament length, flow speed and time. The output was
the amplitude of the filament endpoint displacement.
Test 1: Fig. 4a shows the inputs and outputs for the first
test. The tested NN was trained at different filament lengths,
L = 40, 60, 80 and 100 mm and expected NN values were
obtained for filament length L = 50 mm. For each filament
length, more than 10 different flow speeds within the interval
[4.2; 8.7] m/s were tested. The output was the flapping frequen-
cies. These are compared with the one found using Fast Four-
ier Transform (FFT) of the row time series.
The suggested NN architecture was feed-forward NN with
an input layer, which has 10 sigmoid neurons and one pure-
linear neuron in the output layer. The hidden layer was tested
5, 10, 12, 20 purelinear neurons.
Fig. 4b illustrates NMSE for each number of neurons of the
hidden layer. The best performance was for a hidden layer of
12 neurons.
Fig. 5 shows the relation between the flow speed and the
flapping frequency for both the experimental data and the
Fig. 7 Neural network architecture for test 2; NMSE for each number of neurons in the hidden layer.
1371
output of suggested Feed-Forward Neural Networks (FFNN)
at L = 40, 60, 80 and 100 mm, respectively.
Fig. 6 shows the comparison between the experimental data
and the expected NN values relation between the flow speed
and the flapping frequency for L = 50 mm.
Test 2: Fig. 7a shows the suggested NN architecture for this
test. It is a feed-forward NN with an input layer, which has 10
sigmoid neurons and one pure-linear neuron in the output
layer. These layers were tested with one hidden layer contain-
ing 5, 10, 12, 20 pure-linear neurons. In this test, we used time
as the third input in addition to the two inputs of the first test
namely: the filament length and the flow speed. The output
here is the amplitude of the flapping motion. For certain fila-
ment length and flow conditions, the filament flapping dynam-
ics is not always periodic, but it can be chaotic or quasi-
periodic [13]. The goal of this second test is to test the ability
of the NN in predicting the complex flapping dynamics of
the filament. The output in this test is the displacement time
series of the filament free end. This time series will be
1372 M. Fayed et al.

V = 5.2 m/s V = 7.7 m/s

V = 6.3 m/s V = 8.48 m/s

Fig. 8 Comparison between the trained NN values and experimental for L = 100 mm and different velocity.

V = 4.376 m/s V = 7.681 m/s

V = 4.947 m/s V = 8.583 m/s

Fig. 9 Comparison between the trained NN values and experimental for L = 50 mm and different velocity.
The ability of forecasting flapping frequency of flexible filament
V = 5.119 m/s
V = 7.592 m/s
Fig. 10 Comparison between the trained NN values and experimental for L = 80 mm and different velocity.
compared to the one measured experimentally. Fig. 7b illus-
trates NMSE for each number of neurons of the hidden layer.
The best performance was for a hidden layer of 12 neurons.
The amplitude of the filament flapping was changing with
time. The training was made for a period of 0.25 s which rep-
resents in average 300-time steps. The data was trained for
around 12 flapping periods. In the case of low flow speed
and small length filament, the flapping is symmetric, and all
the flapping cycles were identical. For high velocities and long
filament, the filament flapping is not strictly periodic. The flap-
ping showed amplitude modulations.
The neural network was trained for four different filament
lengths and four flow velocities. The results of training for the
case of L = 100 and 50 mm are shown in Figs. 8 and 9. As
shown in the figures the comparisons between the experimental
and the trained data using neural agreed well for all the cases.
The prediction, made for L = 80 mm and four flow velocities,
are shown in Fig. 10. This figure shows a quite good prediction
as long as the filament flaps periodically. The predictions start
to depart from the experimental data when relatively small
wave modulation is present when flow speeds get higher.
4. Conclusion
The aim of this study was testing the ability of the neural net-
work to forecast the flexible filament flapping dynamics in 2D
flow. It was found to be practically applicable to predict the
fundamental flapping frequency of the flexible filament. The
capability was tested by using two models. For both models,
1373
V = 6.754 m/s
V = 8.737 m/s
the suggested ANN model was a feed-forward neural network
with three layers: one input layer, one output layer and a hid-
den layer in between. The backpropagation Levenberg-
Marquardt algorithm was used to perform the training of
the suggested ANN. In the first model, the flapping fundamen-
tal frequency was successfully predicted when the filament
length and the flow speed were given as inputs. In the second
model, time was used to be as a third input in addition to
the two inputs of the first model and the output was the dis-
placement time series of the filament free end. The neural net-
work was able to predict successfully the amplitude of the
filament oscillations when the flapping was periodic. However,
as soon as small amplitude modulation of the periodic flapping
starts to appear, some discrepancies between the predicted and
the observed oscillations were noticed. These discrepancies
grow with the increase of the amplitude modulations until
the prediction is completely lost.
Declaration of Competing Interest
The authors declared that there is no conflict of interest.
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