Phase averaged velocity field in the near wake of a square cylinder obtained by a PIV method

Phase averaged velocity fields in the near wake region behind a square cylinder have been successfully obtained using randomly sampled PIV data sets. The Reynolds number based on the flow velocity and the model height was 3,900. To identify the phase information, we examined the magnitude of circulation and the center of peak vorticity. The center of vorticity was estimated from lowpass filtered vorticity contours adopting a sub-pixel searching algorithm. Due to the sinusoidal nature of circulation which is closely related to the instantaneous vorticity, the location of peak vorticity fits well with a sine curve of the circulation magnitude. Conditionally averaged velocity fields represent the Karman Vortex shedding phenomenon quite successfully within ±5° phase uncertainty. The oscillating nature of the separated shear layers and the separation bubble at the upper and lower surfaces are clearly observed. With the hot-wire measurement of Strouhal frequency, we found that the convection velocity changes its magnitude very rapidly from 25 to 75 percent of the free stream velocity along the streamwise direction when the flow passes the recirculation region.