Effect of Sinusoidal Oscillatory Flow on a Vertical Wall-Mounted Cylinder

Abstract

Abstract The purpose of this study is to numerically investigate the bed shear stress and near-bed mixing due to coherent vortex structures in the vicinity of a vertically wall-mounted circular cylinder subject to an imposed finite-depth oscillatory sinusoidal flow. Previous studies reveal that the Keulegan–Carpenter (KC) number influences the formation of lee-side wake vortex structures as well as the horseshoe vortex in front of a cylinder. Therefore, parametric studies in a moderately wide range of KC from 5 to 20 are numerically performed. In the present study, Direct Numerical Simulation (DNS) is conducted using the open-source software, OpenFOAM, that solves the three-dimensional unsteady incompressible Navier-Stokes equations using finite volume method. Nondimensional parameters used in the simulations are carefully chosen to represent the real physics. The numerical solutions are first validated using an analytical solution for the oscillating Stokes flow and the results are then systematically and quantitatively compared with the experimental measurements. The results show that the lee-side wake is significantly influenced by KC, and distinctive types of the lee-side wake are generated and classified based on KC. It is also found that both KC and the ratio of the thickness of the Stokes boundary layer to the water depth are heavily associated with the stability of the lee-side wake. In addition, the simulated size and lifespan of the horseshoe vortex agree well with the experimental data.