Comparison of Hydrodynamic Characteristics of Porous and Solid Square Cylinder at Low Reynolds Number Using CFD

Abstract

AbstractThe study of flow around bluff bodies like cylinders, spheres, etc. is very popular as it finds applications not only in aerodynamics but also in many other engineering fields (e.g., heat exchangers in nuclear reactors, ship hydrodynamics, skyscrapers, cooling systems, pipelines, etc.). Porous cylinders with equivalent strength and other mechanical properties will be preferred over solid cylinders due to their better fluid flow and heat transfer performance. This work deals with the comparison of fluid flow properties of the square solid cylinder to the square porous cylinder at low Reynolds number using computational fluid dynamics (CFD). The cylinder with square as cross section and D as length is placed symmetrically in a three-dimensional computational domain with upstream and downstream distances of 7.5D and 20D, respectively. The height and span-wise distance of the domain are considered as 15D and 6D, respectively. Velocity inlet with a velocity of 1 m/s and 0 Pa pressure is considered as the boundary condition at the inlet. The boundary condition at the outlet is considered as a pressure outlet with 0 Pa pressure. A no-slip boundary condition with stationary wall condition is considered for the walls of the domain along with the cylinder surface. A circular cylinder cross section and a diameter D from the literature have been considered for validation of the computations. The analysis is carried out at low Reynolds numbers, namely Re = 170, 185, 200 and 250. The results obtained proved that square porous cylinder outperforms solid square cylinder in all aspects.KeywordsPorous square cylinderCFDReynolds number