Shedding patterns of the near-wake vortices behind a circular cylinder

The unsteady incompressible Navier-Stokes equations have been accurately solved for the laminar flow past a circular cylinder in the Reynolds number range 50–200. A direct elliptic solver called the SEVP is used to rapidly advance the streamfunction in time, facilitating the overall convergence to the fully periodic or quasi-steady state. A new integral-series method is developed for the far-field streamfunction condition on a finite two-dimensional computational domain. The use of fourth-order Hermitian relations for the convection terms in the conservation-form vorticity transport equation has also contributed to the good comparison of the present results with the earlier experimental data. The vortex-shedding patterns visualized by the experimentalist are numerically reproduced here in the given Reynolds number range. Discussions that may be helpful in interpreting the behaviour of the shedding frequency are presented in the main text.