67th Annual Meeting of the APS Division of Fluid Dynamics (November 23, 2014 — November 25, 2014)

V0013: High resolution simulation of Karman vortex street in 2D flow past a cylinder

Authors

• David Trebotich, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/APS.DFD.2014.GFM.V0013

Flow past bluff bodies has long been studied by fluid dynamicists due to the importance in the aerodynamics industry.  There is a known instability that occurs when modeling the two dimensional flow equations for flow past a cylinder during transition to turbulence known as the Karman vortex street.  We model the vortex street at unprecedented scale and resolution, with a wake length of over 200 diameters of the cylinder. The simulation depicts secondary, tertiary and even quaternary wake structures because of the scale of the domain.  These structures are captured at high resolution where only the vortices are refined on the grid using adaptive mesh refinement combined with a cut cell method.  The finest resolution covers only 5% of the domain.  We have similarly modeled the three dimensional flow equations and the results depict a regularized vortex street.  These results can be applied to develop new industry standards for the FAA such as take-off and landing patterns in the airline industry.