Revision as of 12:06, 10 January 2011

Flows Around Bodies

Underlying Flow Regime 2-10

Description

Introduction

The flow past finite-height cylinders mounted on a wall is of considerable, practical and fundamental fluid mechanics interest. It has many applications such as flow past cylindrical buildings, stacks or cooling towers, rods in various technical equipment such as fuel or central rods in nuclear power plants, or cylinders used as idealized vegetation roughness elements in atmospheric boundary layers and open channels. The flow is very rich in featuring a variety of phenomena and is particularly complex as it is three-dimensional, highly unsteady and contains several interacting vortex systems. The much studied flow past long cylinders is already quite complex due to the unsteady vortex shedding, but in the case of finite-height cylinders there are in addition end-effects both on the ground side and on the free end. In addition to the Reynolds number, the height-to-diameter-ratio h/D and the relative boundary- layer thickness of the approach flow δ/h are the parameters in the finite-height case.

Contributed by: Guillermo Palau-Salvador, Wolfgang Rodi, — Universidad Politecnica de Valencia, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology