Examination of Wake Characteristics for Tandem Circular Cylinders via Computational Fluid Dynamics

Abstract

Wake characteristics of the cylinders have been numerically investigated for tandem arrangement. The study was done for airflow at a diameter-based Reynolds number of Re = 200 via ANSYS-Fluent 2021 R1. Variations of horizontal distances between two cylinders with the same diameter have been considered in the 1.5 ≤ L* ≤ 6 range. The drag coefficients have been attained, and these results have been presented along with flow characteristics of velocity components, magnitude values for vorticity, and pressure distributions. In front of the upstream cylinder, flow stagnated in all cases. Nonetheless, it has been observed for L* ≥ 4.5 in terms of the downstream cylinder. The periodical clusters for cross-stream velocity components have been attained in the wake region. Vortex shedding has been observed in the flow patterns. The unsteady flow structures have been seen. The spacing between the circular cylinders influenced the drag force. Nevertheless, the effect of an upstream cylinder on the downstream one disappeared for L* ≥ 4.5 in this study. The drag coefficient of the upstream cylinder is approximately the same concerning the value of a single one in terms of L* ≥ 4.5 as a result of the study

Keywords

• Computational fluid dynamics (CFD)
• circular cylinder
• drag coefficient
• tandem arrangement
• wake characteristics

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