Wake patterns of flow past a pair of circular cylinders in side-by-side arrangements at low Reynolds numbers

Abstract

A flow past two side-by-side identical circular cylinders was numerically investigated with the unstructured spectral element method. From the computational results at various non-dimensional distances between cylinder centers T/ D and the Reynolds number Re, a total of nine kinds of wake patterns were observed: four steady wake patterns, including single bluff-body steady pattern, separated double-body steady pattern and transition steady pattern for sub-critical Reynolds numbers and biased steady pattern for super-critical Reynolds numbers, and five unsteady wake patterns, including single bluff-body periodic pattern, biased quasi-steady pattern, quasi-periodic (flip-flopping) pattern, in-phase-synchronized pattern and anti-phase-synchronized pattern. Time evolution of lift and drag coefficients corresponding to each unsteady wake pattern was given.