Effect of blockage on the drag of a triangular cylinder

Abstract

A method is presented to estimate the form drag and the base pressure on a triangular cylinder in the presence of blockage effect. The Strouhal number, which is found to increase with the flow constriction experimentally by Ramamurthy & Ng (1973), may be decoupled from the blockage effect when re-defined by using the velocity at flow separation and a theoretical wake width. By incorporating this wake width into the momentum equation by Maskell (1963) for the confined flow, a relationship between the form drag and the base pressure is derived. Independently, the experimental data of surface pressure from Ramamurthy & Lee (1973) are found to be independent of the blockage effect when expressed in terms of a modified pressure coefficient involving the pressure at separation. Using the potential flow model by Parkinson & Jandali (1970) and its subsequent development in Yeung & Parkinson (2000) for the unconfined flow, a linear relation between the pressure at separation and the form drag is formulated. By solving the two equations simultaneously with a specified blockage ratio and an apex angle of the triangular cylinder, the predictions of the drag and the base pressure are in reasonable agreement with experimental data. A new theoretical relationship for the Strouhal number, pressure drag coefficient and base pressure proposed in this study allows the confinement effect to be appropriately taken into consideration. The present approach may be extended to three-dimensional bluff bodies.