Vortex generation in the cross-flow around a cylinder attached to an end-wall

Abstract

A cylinder attached to an end-wall normal to its axis is a common feature of many practical flow systems, e.g. in turbo-machinery or when a bridge is supported by a pillar from the bed of a river. In this situation, the nominally two-dimensional boundary layer flow incident upon the cylinder develops strong three-dimensional features and a very pronounced vortex structure may arise in the upstream flow close to the wall. For the appropriate Reynolds number range, the upstream vortical structure is nominally steady and is commonly referred to as the “horseshoe vortex system”. In contrast, the flow downstream is unsteady and periodic over a wide range of Reynolds numbers and vortices aligned with the cylinder axis are shed at a regular frequency into the wake. The generation of both these vortex systems requires energy to be extracted from the incident flow with the result that the drag force on the cylinder is increased. This paper concentrates on the upstream region of the cylinder and discusses an investigation in which two-component Particle Image Velocimetry (PIV) has been used to visualise the flow behaviour for a circular cylinder on a plane end-wall. The use of PIV has enabled two orthogonal velocity components to be measured in planes defined by the upstream flow direction and the axis of the cylinder. The third (out-of-plane) velocity component was then calculated by integrating the continuity equation. Subsequently, the velocity field information has been manipulated and converted into time-averaged information. Discussion of the measured results confirms that colour displays are an invaluable aid to understanding this complex fluid flow situation since they reveal substantially more information than grey-scale plots of the same data. In particular, the source of the horseshoe vortex system can be identified when colour plots of the time-averaged velocity and vorticity distributions are obtained. A limited amount of information on the unsteady vortex structures appearing in the end-wall region upstream of the cylinder is also presented. Finally, the experimental findings are discussed in relation to the results of previous workers.