Low Reynolds number flows

Undergraduate Dissertation: Characterization and analysis of flow past tandem cylinders arrangement at a low Reynolds number of 100

This project was carried out under the supervision of Dr. Supradeepan K between January - September 2017. As part of this project, the different flow regimes in the case of tandem circular cylinders arrangement were characterized using a lot of tools such as Lambda-2 criterion, lift and drag coefficient time histories, vorticity patterns, Frequency Spectrum analysis (FFT) and phase portrait plots. Further, statistical tools such as Proper Orthogonal Decomposition (POD) were applied on the flow field to study the spatial and temporal modes. In addition to these, the instantaneous shear and normal stresses in the flow field due to periodic fluctuations were computed and used in combination with the other tools to characterize the flow regimes.

A total of 5 distinct flow regimes, including two intermediate flow regimes were identified as part of this study. A few results from this study have been shown below. The periodic nature of the wake in the case of T=5.0D, where T and D refer to the distance between the cylinders and diameter of each cylinder respectively, can be observed the following figure.

Instantaneous shear stress contours at T=5.0D

    POD 3rd mode for stream-wise velocity for T=5.0D

Parts of this work was submitted to International Conference on Theoretical, Applied, Computational and Experimental Mechanics 2017 and was published as part of their proceedings.