1.

Unconfined cylinder
1.1 Simulation setup
Consider the steady, two-dimensional and isothermal flow of a viscous incompressible Newtonian fluid past an
infinitely long circular cylinder placed in a uniform stream, as shown schematically in Fig. 1.

The flow is bounded by the plane confining walls, AB and CD. These are treated as solid walls.

while AC and BD are the flow inlet and outlet planes.

The unconfined flow condition was approximated by choosing the outer cylindrical boundary at 112 cylinder
radii away.

A stationary circular cylinder of diameter d is placed symmetrically with respect to the z-direction and
equidistant from the walls.

To allow for sufficient upstream and downstream distances, the cylinder is located at 150d and 250d away from
the inlet and the outlet, respectively. The fluid enters the plane AC at a uniform velocity of U∞.

Fig. 1. Schematics of flow past a circular cylinder.

The boundary conditions used for the numerical simulations can be defined as follows:

 Inlet boundary AC: The fluid was assumed to enter the inlet plane at a uniform velocity V x =U ∞ ;
V y =0

 Exit boundary at BD: The exit plane BD was assigned the outflow boundary. In such case, a zero
diffusion flux for all flow variables was assumed. In essence, it implies that the conditions of the
outflow plane are extrapolated from within the domain and have no impact on the upstream flow. This
is consistent with a fully developed flow assumption.

 Confining walls AB and CD: In general, no-slip boundary condition is imposed on a solid wall. From
the point of view of numerical simulation, this can be achieved by keeping the wall either (1) stationary,
or (2) moving with the uniform fluid velocity, U∞. In this study, the second condition was employed at
both the upper and the lower walls. As a consequence, if the inlet velocity profile of the fluid is flat
across the inlet plane, it remains flat throughout the domain except for a region close to the cylinder
where the local velocity profile is altered due to the cylinder. This was also necessitated in order to
compare the present results with the published works to validate the numerical solution procedure used
in this work. Also, in practical terms, this condition is more appropriate to the phenomenon associated
 with the free fall of circular cylinders in a quiescent medium. Hence, under the latter condition of no-
slip, V x =U ∞ ; V y =0

 Cylinder surface: At the surface of the stationary cylinder, the usual no-slip boundary condition is
applied V x =0 ; V y =0

Descritisation:
Flow over cylinder is assumed as an incompressible Newtonian laminar fluid in steady-state so,
for space discretisation, a second order upwind scheme is used.

1.3 Grid sensitivity study

In order to find out the best grid size for our cases, grid sensitivity study has been done for the
Reynolds number, 20.

Figure 21 shows the drag coefficient for five grid sizes. For the two last grids, the diagram
converges to the value of 2.83, Therefore the grid size of 67152 cells is sufficient to reach
convergence for Reynolds number, 20 .

Element
Name Mesh Nodes Mesh Elements lift drag
Size
Units m
1 1.34 1223 2332 0.02152721 2.7780251
2 0.67 2673 5140 0.00680405 2.8575801
3 0.335 8992 17592 0.02375455 2.8277835
4 0.1675 33959 67152 0.01230333 2.8352765
5 0.08375 134874 268236 0.03690986 2.8341869
 Figure 21 Drag coefficient for 5 grid sizes
2.88
2.86
2.84
Drag coefficient

2.82
2.8
2.78
2.76
2.74
2.72
0 50000 100000 150000 200000 250000 300000
Elements

1.4 Comparison with the literature

the present results are compared with those of Kawaguti and Jain [4], Chakraborty and Verma for the
flow past an unconfined circular cylinder for Re = 10–50, The unconfined flow condition was
approximated by choosing the outer cylindrical boundary at 112 cylinder radii away.

Table 1 compares the present values of CD, CDP, CDF and θs (angle of separation) with those of
Kawaguti and Jain [4], Chakraborty and Verma for different values of the Reynolds number.

Present work Chakraborty’s work

Re CD CDF CDP ϴS CD CDF CDP ϴS

10 2,8352 1,0133 1,2791 35,28 2.7896 1.2248 1.5648 29.74

20 2,0519 0,7039 1,1001 54,60 2.0223 0.8044 1.2179 42.49
30 1,7264 0,5687 1,0558 58,26 1.7027 0.6264 1.0763 48.22

40 1,5479 0,4869 1,0239 60,51 1.5172 0.5229 0.9943 53.37

50 1,4300 0,4292 1,0041 63,34 1.3923 0.4537 0.9386 56.24

Present work Kawaguti and jain work

 Re CD CDF CDP ϴS CD CDF CDP ϴS

10 2,8352 1,0133 1,2791 35,28 2.87 1.252 1.618 30.71

20 2,0519 0,7039 1,1001 54,60 2.09 0.854 1.236 43.57

30 1,7264 0,5687 1,0558 58,26 1.76 0.651 1.109 50.00

40 1,5479 0,4869 1,0239 60,51 1.529 0.527 1.0015 53.70

50 1,4300 0,4292 1,0041 63,34 1.44 0.450 0.990 58.57

3 70
60
2.5
50
2
40
ϴs

1.5 30
Cd

1 20
10
0.5
0
0 5 10 15 20 25 30 35 40 45 50 55
5 10 15 20 25 30 35 40 45 50 55
Re
Re

1.4 1.2

1.2 1
1
0.8
0.8
0.6
CDp

CDf

0.6
0.4
0.4

0.2 0.2

0 0
5 10 15 20 25 30 35 40 45 50 55 5 10 15 20 25 30 35 40 45 50 55
Re Re