Experimental and Numerical Flow Visualization of a Single Square Cylinder

Abstract

Study of the flow around square cylinders has not taken a great consideration from the scientists in comparison with the circular cylinders, although they are widely used in many engineering applications such as buildings and electronic components. Therefore the main object of this work is to study experimentally and numerically the flow around the square cylinder. An experimental test rig was implemented to measure the pressure distribution on cylinder surfaces for different angles of incident flow. Three Reynolds numbers of 13.5, 9.5 and 6.8 × 104 were considered for these cases. The drag and side forces were estimated for different angles of attack. The flow was visualized for the different conditions considered. The experimental data were verified by numerical data that were provided for the same used conditions by ANSYS 5.4 commercial code. The code was modified to simulate the considered cases; it is reliable enough to provide different flow patterns by computational fluid dynamics (CFD) tools. Compressible turbulent flow was taken into consideration to solve the two-dimensional Navier-Stokes equations with a turbulent model. The numerical simulation as a cheap tool allowed presenting full flow visualization and variables distribution in the considered test domain. A close agreement between the experimental and numerical results was obtained.