Wake Dynamics of External Flow Past a Curved Circular Cylinder with the Free-Stream Aligned to the Plane of Curvature

Abstract

The fundamental mechanism of vortex shedding past a curved cylinder has been investigated at a Reynolds number of 100 using three-dimensional spectral/hp computations. Two different configurations are presented herein:in both cases the main component of the geometry is a circular cylinder whose centreline is a quarter of a ring and the inflow direction is parallel to the plane of curvature.

In the first set of simulations the cylinder is forced to transversely oscillate at a fixed amplitude, while the oscillation frequency has been varied around the Strouhal value. Both geometries exhibit in-phase vortex shedding, with the vortex cores bent according to the body's curvature, although the wake topology is markedly different. In particular, the configuration that was found to suppress the vortex shedding in absence of forced motion exhibits now a primary instability in the near wake. A second set of simulations has been performed imposing an oscillatory roll to the curved cylinder, which is forced to rotate transversely around the axis of its bottom section. This case shows entirely different wake features from the previous one: the vortex shedding appears to be out-of-phase along the body's span, with straight cores that tend to twist after being shed and manifest a secondary spanwise instability. Further, the damping effect stemming from the transverse planar motion of the part of the cylinder parallel to the flow is no longer present, leading to a positive energy transfer from the fluid to the structure.