Technical Papers and Presentations

Incompressible flow field past a circular cylinder within parallel plate channel is very important in industry and science. As well known, beyond the Reynolds number based on the diameter of the cylinder and uniform flow velocity of 40, flow past a circular cylinder cannot hold its two dimensional nature and becomes unsteady and three-dimensional. When the cylinder is immersed into parallel plate channel, blockage effect appears and the drag coefficient is strongly influenced. The present paper studied the blockage effect of a circular cylinder immersed in parallel plate channel with having 10% blockage ratio defined by the diameter of circular cylinder/the channel width. Finite-element analysis was conducted with  variational multiscale method which has been introduced in COMSOL Multiphysics^® simulation software. It was found that the present computation at the Reynolds number of 3,900 shows two dimensional nature of flow field holds upstream the circular cylinder and three-dimensional flow is developed in the downstream side of the cylinder, and the predicted drag coefficient agrees with measurement when using blockage correction proposed by Maskell.