Validation case: flow past a cylinder

November 19, 2018

The computational domain is rectangular, with length Ly = 64 and height Lz = 12 (see

figure 1). The cylinder has diameter d = 1. Two configurations are compared: ‘fixed’
and ‘moving’. The ‘fixed’ cylinder is placed at distance 1 from the left boundary of the
domain and 6.005 from the bottom boundary. This position does not change in time.
The small offset (0.005) above the horizontal symmetry axis of the domain breaks the
top-bottom symmetry of the mask function. The flow is assumed two-dimensional.
The mean flow is forced in the horizontal direction with velocity U = 1. The number
of grid points is equal to Ny = 4096 and Nz = 768. The penalization parameter is
equal to η = 10−3 . The flow starts impulsively at time t = 0, and the computation
stops at time tmax = 60.

The ‘moving’ cylinder is placed initially at the distance of 61 units from the left bound-
ary and moves to the left with unit speed. Zero mean flow is forced. Otherwise, all
parameters are the same as in the ‘fixed’ case.

Three values of the Reynolds number are considered: Re = 20, 40 and 100. Figure 2
displays the vorticity field of a ‘fixed’ cylinder at Re = 100. By the time t = 60, the
symmetric wake breaks down and a vortex street develops.

The drag coefficient is calculated as

2Fx
cd = , (1)
ρU 2 d
where Fx is the drag force and ρ = 1 is the fluid density. Figure 3(a) shows the time
evolution of cD of the ‘fixed’ cylinder at different Re. After the initial transient, the

Lz U
d

Ly

Figure 1: Schematic drawing of the computational domain.

1
 Vorticity
4
10 2
0
5
-2
0 -4
0 10 20 30 40 50 60

Figure 2: ‘Fixed’ cylinder, Re = 100. Vorticity at time t = 60.

ultimate value of cD is approximately reached at t = 20 when the wake is symmetric. At

Re = 100, the drag coefficient slightly increases after t = 35 because of the transition
towards the periodic vortex shedding. Note that even though the vortex street is
an unsteady flow, the force coefficient oscillates very little at this Re. Figure 3(b)
compares cD obtained by averaging between t = 55 and t = 60, with the values known
from experiments (data adapted from [1]). The slight discrepancy at Re = 20 may
be due to an insufficient domain size, because the vorticity is more spread-out at this
value of Re.

Finally, figure 4(a) compares the drag coefficient of ‘fixed’ and ‘moving’ cylinders at
Re = 20. The difference between them is very small: it only consists in grid-frequency
oscillations, and their amplitude is less than 0.1% of the mean value. The difference
between the vorticity fields of the ‘fixed’ and ‘moving’ cylinders, shown in figure 4(a)
for t = 60, is also very small. It is less than 1%, and rapidly decays with the distance
from the cylinder.

References
[1] Anatol Roshko. Experiments on the flow past a circular cylinder at very high
reynolds number. Journal of Fluid Mechanics, 10:345–356, 5 1961.

(a) (b )
4 4
Re =20 Experiment
40 Computation
3 3
100
cD
cD

2 2

1 1

0 0
0 20 40 60 0 20 40 60 80 100
t Re

Figure 3: Drag coefficient versus time (a) and versus the Reynolds number (b).

2
 (a) ( b ) Vorticity difference (moving-fixed)
2.299 7 0.04
moving
2.2985
fixed
6.5 0.02
2.298
cD

2.2975
6 0
2.297

2.2965 5.5 -0.02

2.296
40 40.05 40.1 5 -0.04
t 0 1 2

Figure 4: (a) Drag coefficient versus time of a ‘fixed’ and of a ‘moving’ cylinder at
Re = 100. (b) Difference between the vorticity fields in these two cases, at t = 60.