Numerical study of incompressible flow about fixed cylinder pairs

A comprehensive numerical investigation of incompressible flow about fixed cylinder pairs is performed. Cylinder arrangements include tandem, side-by-side, and staggered and Reynolds numbers of 80 and 1000 are considered. A second order Streamline Upwind Petrov-Galerkin projection scheme is used along with routines for interactive steering and dynamic meshing to solve the 2-D incompressible Navier-Stokes equations efficiently on a large number of different configurations. Qualitative and quantitative comparisons with published experimental data are made which show the ability of the present numerical method to capture complex, unsteady flow features. Experimentally observed flow physics such as hysteresis effects in tandem arrangements and bistable biased gap flow in tandem arrangements have been reproduced by the present numerical method. Furthermore, an extensive series of staggered simulations in experimentally classified interference regimes has been performed. (C) 2003 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.