Flow pattern determination for circular staggered cylinders in cross flow using CFD

Abstract

The flow of fluid nearby two circular staggered cylinders of identical size was investigated using computational flow dynamics (CFD). The center-to-center pitch ratio was taken constant, P/D = 2, and the incidence angle (α) was changing from 0° to 90°. Reynolds number (Re) used during the simulation was 300. This Re belongs to the periodic vortex shedding regime. Navier-Stokes equation was used to solve this unsteady flow problem in Two-dimensional incompressible form. Gambit 2.2.3 was used for the development of flow geometry configuration was as it allows imposing the boundary conditions of flow domain with ease. The flow field of staggered arrangement experimented evaluated experimentally in literature for five cases, namely, shear-layer-reattachment (SLR) for α = 0º, vortex pairing and enveloping (VPE) for α = 45º, vortex pairing, synchronized vortex shedding (SVS) and splitting for α = 90º was predicted using numerical model successfully.