Scaling laws for drag of a compliant body in an incompressible viscous flow

Motivated by an important discovery on the drag scaling law (the 4/3 power law) of a flexible fibre in a flowing soap film by Alben et al. (Nature vol. 420, 2002, p. 479) at high Reynolds numbers (2000 < Re < 40 000), we investigate drag scaling laws at moderate Re for a compliant fibre tethered at the midpoint and submerged in an incompressible viscous flow using the immersed boundary (113) method. Our work shows that the scaling of drag with respect to oncoming flow speed varies with Re, and the exponents of the power laws decrease monotonically from approximately 2 towards 4/3 as Re increases from 10 to 800.