Finite element study of vortex‐induced cross‐flow and in‐line oscillations of a circular cylinder at low Reynolds numbers

Vortex‐induced vibrations of a circular cylinder placed in a uniform flow at Reynolds number 325 are investigated using a stabilized space–time finite element formulation. The Navier–Stokes equations for incompressible fluid flow are solved for a two‐dimensional case along with the equations of motion of the cylinder that is mounted on lightly damped spring supports. The cylinder is allowed to vibrate, both in the in‐line and in the cross‐flow directions. Results of the computations are presented for various values of the structural frequency of the oscillator, including those that are sub and superharmonics of the vortex‐shedding frequency for a stationary cylinder. In most of the cases, the trajectory of the cylinder corresponds to a Lissajou figure of 8. Lock‐in is observed for a range of values of the structural frequency. Over a certain range of structural frequency (F_s), the vortex‐shedding frequency of the oscillating cylinder does not match F_s exactly; there is a slight detuning. This phenomenon is referred to as soft‐lock‐in. Computations show that this detuning disappears when the mass of the cylinder is significantly larger than the mass of the surrounding fluid it displaces. A self‐limiting nature of the oscillator with respect to cross‐flow vibration amplitude is observed. It is believed that the detuning of the vortex‐shedding frequency from the structural frequency is a mechanism of the oscillator to self‐limit its vibration amplitude. The dependence of the unsteady solution on the spatial resolution of the finite element mesh is also investigated. Copyright © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

SOME EXPERIMENTS ON FLOW-INDUCED VIBRATION OF A CIRCULAR CYLINDER WITH SURFACE ROUGHNESS

Aeroelastic instability of a circular cylinder with surface roughness was experimentally studied by free-oscillation tests in a wind tunnel. Flows at high Reynolds numbers could be simulated at relatively low wind velocities, by introducing surface roughness, so as to reduce the value of the critical Reynolds number. The response amplitudes of a roughened cylinder oscillating in the transverse (cross-flow) direction in the flow were measured. The measured range of reduced velocity is about 1·5–8, which includes the critical velocity. The value of a reduced mass-damping parameter (the Scruton number) is constant at about 6. For the aeroelastic instability in the transverse direction, it was found that the oscillation of the roughened cylinder induced by a vortex-excitation is damped down in a small velocity range covering the critical Reynolds number. At Reynolds numbers higher than the critical value, a roughened cylinder vibrates with a large amplitude again, associated with a lock-in phenomenon due to the coincidence of the wake-frequency and the natural frequency of the oscillating cylinder.     

Implicit preconditioned high‐order compact scheme for the simulation of the three‐dimensional incompressible Navier–Stokes equations with pseudo‐compressibility method

This paper combines the pseudo‐compressibility procedure, the preconditioning technique for accelerating the time marching for stiff hyperbolic equations, and high‐order accurate central compact scheme to establish the code for efficiently and accurately solving incompressible flows numerically based on the finite difference discretization. The spatial scheme consists of the sixth‐order compact scheme and 10th‐order numerical filter operator for guaranteeing computational stability. The preconditioned pseudo‐compressible Navier–Stokes equations are marched temporally using the implicit lower–upper symmetric Gauss–Seidel time integration method, and the time accuracy is improved by the dual‐time step method for the unsteady problems. The efficiency and reliability of the present procedure are demonstrated by applications to Taylor decaying vortices phenomena, double periodic shear layer rolling‐up problem, laminar flow over a flat plate, low Reynolds number unsteady flow around a circular cylinder at Re = 200, high Reynolds number turbulence flow past the S809 airfoil, and the three‐dimensional flows through two 90°curved ducts of square and circular cross sections, respectively. It is found that the numerical results of the present algorithm are in good agreement with theoretical solutions or experimental data. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Free vibrations of an elastic cylinder in a cross flow and their effects on the near wake

Fluid-structure interactions resulting from the free vibrations of a two-dimensional elastic cylinder in a cross flow are not well understood. Experimental data pertaining to the interaction behavior is rather scarce, especially that related to the phenomenon of synchronization where the vortex shedding frequency is approximately equal to the natural frequency of the fluid-structure system. The present investigation attempts to examine this problem experimentally using a laser vibrometer to assess the bending displacements and a laser Doppler anemometer to measure the velocities in the wake. Experiments were carried out over a range of reduced velocities. The reduced velocity was first varied by using cylinders of different materials and then by changing the free stream velocity, while maintaining the cylinder diameter constant. A proper choice of materials and reduced velocity allowed the synchronization phenomenon to be investigated. For the range of reduced velocity investigated, the vibration amplitude of the cylinder is finite, even at synchronization, and increases with reduced velocity. The results further show that more than one mode of vibration is excited away from synchronization; however, only the first mode is evident at synchronization. In addition, the near-wake flow behind the elastic cylinder, at three different Reynolds numbers in the sub-critical range, was measured in detail and the data was used to analyse the vibration effects on the mean and turbulence field compared to those measured behind a relatively rigid cylinder at the same Reynolds numbers. It is found that cylinder vibrations have little or no effect on the mean drag and the normalized mean field. However, cylinder vibrations enhance turbulent mixing, thus resulting in a substantial increase in the turbulent intensities. This implies that the large-scale vortical motion is also affected. Nevertheless, turbulence structure in the inertial sub-range is not affected by cylinder vibrations. The slopes of the velocity spectra in this range is still measured to be −5/3 for the freely vibrating cylinders investigated. Received: 20 December 1998/Accepted: 20 September 1999     

A stable second‐order mass‐weighted upwind scheme for unstructured meshes

In this paper, an original second‐order upwind scheme for convection terms is described and implemented in the context of a Control‐Volume Finite‐Element Method (CVFEM). The proposed scheme is a second‐order extension of the first‐order MAss‐Weighted upwind (MAW) scheme proposed by Saabas and Baliga (Numer. Heat Transfer 1994; 26B :381–407). The proposed second‐order scheme inherits the well‐known stability characteristics of the MAW scheme, but exhibits less artificial viscosity and ensures much higher accuracy. Consequently, and in contrast with nearly all second‐order upwind schemes available in the literature, the proposed second‐order MAW scheme does not need limiters. Some test cases including two pure convection problems, the driven cavity and steady and unsteady flows over a circular cylinder, have been undertaken successfully to validate the new scheme. The verification tests show that the proposed scheme exhibits a low level of artificial viscosity in the pure convection problems; exhibits second‐order accuracy for the driven cavity; gives accurate reattachment lengths for low‐Reynolds steady flow over a circular cylinder; and gives constant‐amplitude vortex shedding for the case of high‐Reynolds unsteady flow over a circular cylinder. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Effects of Oblique Inflow in Vortex-Induced Vibrations

We investigate the validity of the independence principle for fixed yawed circular cylinders and free yawed circular rigid cylinders subject to vortex-induced vibrations (VIV) at subcritical Reynolds number using direct numerical simulation (DNS). We compare forces on the cylinder and cylinder responses for different angles of yaw and reduced velocities, and investigate the value of the critical angle of yaw. We also present flow visualizations and examine flow structures corresponding to different angles of yaw and reduced velocities.     

A stress‐based least‐squares finite‐element model for incompressible Navier–Stokes equations

In this paper we present a stress‐based least‐squares finite‐element formulation for the solution of the Navier–Stokes equations governing flows of viscous incompressible fluids. Stress components are introduced as independent variables to make the system first order. Continuity equation becomes an algebraic equation and is eliminated from the system with suitable modifications. The h and p convergence are verified using the exact solution of Kovasznay flow. Steady flow past a large circular cylinder in a channel is solved to test mass conservation. Transient flow over a backward‐facing step problem is solved on several meshes. Results are compared with that obtained using vorticity‐based first‐order formulation for both benchmark problems. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

A hybrid immersed‐boundary and multi‐block lattice Boltzmann method for simulating fluid and moving‐boundaries interactions

A numerical method is developed for modelling the interactions between incompressible viscous fluid and moving boundaries. The principle of this method is introducing the immersed‐boundary concept in the framework of the lattice Boltzmann method, and improving the accuracy and efficiency of the simulation by refining the mesh near moving boundaries. Besides elastic boundary with a constitutive law, the method can also efficiently simulate solid moving‐boundary interacting with fluid by employing the direct forcing technique. The method is validated by the simulations of flow past a circular cylinder, two cylinders moving with respect to each other and flow around a hovering wing. The versatility of the method is demonstrated by the numerical studies including elastic filament flapping in the wake of a cylinder and fish‐like bodies swimming in quiescent fluid. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

A local‐analytic‐based discretization procedure for the numerical solution of incompressible flows

An Erratum has been published for this article in International Journal for Numerical Methods in Fluids 2005, 49(8): 933. We present a local‐analytic‐based discretization procedure for the numerical solution of viscous fluid flows governed by the incompressible Navier–Stokes equations. The general procedure consists of building local interpolants obtained from local analytic solutions of the linear multi‐dimensional advection–diffusion equation, prototypical of the linearized momentum equations. In view of the local analytic behaviour, the resulting computational stencil and coefficient values are functions of the local flow conditions. The velocity–pressure coupling is achieved by a discrete projection method. Numerical examples in the form of well‐established verification and validation benchmarks are presented to demonstrate the capabilities of the formulation. The discretization procedure is implemented alongside the ability to treat embedded and non‐matching grids with relative motion. Of interest are flows at high Reynolds number, ??(10⁵)–??(10⁷), for which the formulation is found to be robust. Applications include flow past a circular cylinder undergoing vortex‐induced vibrations (VIV) at high Reynolds number. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

A time‐implicit high‐order compact differencing and filtering scheme for large‐eddy simulation

This work investigates a high‐order numerical method which is suitable for performing large‐eddy simulations, particularly those containing wall‐bounded regions which are considered on stretched curvilinear meshes. Spatial derivatives are represented by a sixth‐order compact approximation that is used in conjunction with a tenth‐order non‐dispersive filter. The scheme employs a time‐implicit approximately factored finite‐difference algorithm, and applies Newton‐like subiterations to achieve second‐order temporal and sixth‐order spatial accuracy. Both the Smagorinsky and dynamic subgrid‐scale stress models are incorporated in the computations, and are used for comparison along with simulations where no model is employed. Details of the method are summarized, and a series of classic validating computations are performed. These include the decay of compressible isotropic turbulence, turbulent channel flow, and the subsonic flow past a circular cylinder. For each of these cases, it was found that the method was robust and provided an accurate means of describing the flowfield, based upon comparisons with previous existing numerical results and experimental data. Published in 2003 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Numerical simulation of the fluid–structure interaction in a tube array under cross flow at moderate and high Reynolds number

The unsteady loads in a tube bundle are studied at moderate and high Reynolds number by means of URANS and hybrid (DDES) modelling. The onset of fluid-elastic instability is analysed for different structural parameters, Scruton number and reduced velocity. The simulations have been carried out with the code NSMB (Navier–Stokes Multi Block) by using turbulence modelling methods URANS and DDES (Delayed Detached Eddy Simulation). The CEA-DIVA configuration is considered for the cylinders array for an inter-tube Reynolds number 60 000. The study is carried out for a configuration of (4×5) cylinders in static conditions as well as for the vertical free motion of one of the central cylinders in one DOF (Degree Of Freedom).The inter-tube Reynolds number is 60 000. It is found that this cylinder spontaneously displays an oscillatory motion which first corresponds to Vortex Induced Vibration (VIV), associated to a lock-in mechanism for low values of the reduced velocity and secondly develops Movement Induced Vibration, MIV, for higher values of the reduced velocity. The variation of the cylinder׳s oscillations frequency, of the unsteady loads and the structure׳s displacement are studied as a function of the reduced velocity for low and high values of the Scruton number. The increase of the phase-lag between the forces and the displacement is predicted and discussed for different Scruton number values and reduced velocities.     

A comparison of time integration methods in an unsteady low‐Reynolds‐number flow

This paper describes three different time integration methods for unsteady incompressible Navier–Stokes equations. Explicit Euler and fractional‐step Adams–Bashford methods are compared with an implicit three‐level method based on a steady‐state SIMPLE method. The implicit solver employs a dual time stepping and an iteration within the time step. The spatial discretization is based on a co‐located finite‐volume technique. The influence of the convergence limits and the time‐step size on the accuracy of the predictions are studied. The efficiency of the different solvers is compared in a vortex‐shedding flow over a cylinder in the Reynolds number range of 100–1600. A high‐Reynolds‐number flow over a biconvex airfoil profile is also computed. The computations are performed in two dimensions. At the low‐Reynolds‐number range the explicit methods appear to be faster by a factor from 5 to 10. In the high‐Reynolds‐number case, the explicit Adams–Bashford method and the implicit method appear to be approximately equally fast while yielding similar results. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Three-dimensional computation for flow-induced vibrations of an upstream circular cylinder in two tandem circular cylinders

It is well known from a lot of experimental data that fluid forces acting on two tandem circular cylinders are quite different from those acting on a single circular cylinder. Therefore, we first present numerical results for fluid forces acting on two tandem circular cylinders, which are mounted at various spacings in a smooth flow, and second we present numerical results for flow-induced vibrations of the upstream circular cylinder in the tandem arrangement. The two circular cylinders are arranged at close spacing in a flow field. The upstream circular cylinder is elastically placed by damper-spring systems and moves in both the in-line and cross-flow directions. In such models, each circular cylinder is assumed as a rigid body. On the other hand, we do not introduce a turbulent model such as the Large Eddy Simulation (LES) or Reynolds Averaged Navier-Stokes (RANS) models into the numerical scheme to compute the fluid flow. Our numerical procedure to capture the flow-induced vibration phenomena of the upstream circular cylinder is treated as a fluid-structure interaction problem in which the ideas of weak coupling is taken into consideration.     

An application of the finite difference‐based lattice Boltzmann model to simulating flow‐induced noise

This paper presents a novel approach to simulate aerodynamically generated sounds by modifying the finite difference‐based lattice BGK compressible fluid model for the purpose of speeding up the calculation and also stabilizing the numerical scheme. With the model, aerodynamic sounds generated by a uniform flow around a two‐dimensional circular cylinder at Re = 150 are simulated. The third‐order‐accurate up‐wind scheme is used for the spatial derivatives, and the second‐order‐accurate Runge–Kutta method is applied for the time marching. The results show that we successively capture very small acoustic pressure fluctuations, with the same frequency of the Karman vortex street, much smaller than the whole pressure fluctuation around a circular cylinder. The propagation velocity of the acoustic waves shows that the points of peak pressure are biased upstream owing to the Doppler effect in the uniform flow. For the downstream, on the other hand, it is faster. It is also apparent that the amplitude of sound pressure is proportional to r^?1/2, r being the distance from the centre of the circular cylinder. Moreover, the edgetone generated by a two‐dimensional jet impinging on a wedge to predict the frequency characteristics of the discrete oscillations of a jet‐edge feedback cycle is investigated. The jet is chosen long enough to guarantee the parabolic velocity profile of the jet at the outlet, and the edge is of an angle of α = 23°. At a stand‐off distance w, the edge is inserted along the centreline of the jet, and a sinuous instability wave with real frequency is assumed to be created in the vicinity of the nozzle exit and to propagate towards the downstream. We have succeeded in capturing small pressure fluctuations resulting from periodic oscillation of jet around the edge. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Solid‐particle erosion in the tube end of the tube sheet of a shell‐and‐tube heat exchanger

Erosion is one of the major problems in many industrial processes, and in particular, in heat exchangers. The effects of flow velocity and sand particle size on the rate of erosion in a typical shell‐and‐tube heat exchanger were investigated numerically using the Lagrangian particle‐tracking method. Erosion and penetration rates were obtained for sand particles of diameters ranging from 10 to 500 µm and for inlet flow velocities ranging from 0.197 to 2.95 m/s. A flow visualization experiment was conducted with the objective of verifying the accuracy of the continuous phase calculation procedure. Comparison with available experimental data of penetration rates was also conducted. These comparisons resulted in a good agreement. The results show that the location and number of eroded tubes depend mainly on the particle size and velocity magnitude at the header inlet. The rate of erosion depends exponentially on the velocity. The particle size shows negligible effect on the erosion rate at high velocity values and the large‐size particles show less erosion rates compared to the small‐size particles at low values of inlet flow velocities. The results indicated that the erosion and penetration rates are insignificant at the lower end of the velocity range. However, these rates were found to increase continuously with the increase of the inlet flow velocity for all particle sizes. The particle size creating the highest erosion rate was found to depend on the flow velocity range. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

An improved Rhie–Chow interpolation scheme for the smoothed‐interface immersed boundary method

Rhie–Chow interpolation is a commonly used method in CFD calculations on a co‐located mesh in order to suppress non‐physical pressure oscillations arising from chequerboard effects. A fully parallelized smoothed‐interface immersed boundary method on a co‐located grid is described in this paper. We discuss the necessity of modifications to the original Rhie–Chow interpolation in order to deal with a locally refined mesh. Numerical simulation with the modified scheme of Choi shows that numerical dissipation due to Rhie–Chow interpolation introduces significant errors at the immersed boundary. To address this issue, we develop an improved Rhie–Chow interpolation scheme that is shown to increase the accuracy in resolving the flow near the immersed boundary. We compare our improved scheme with the modified scheme of Choi by parallel simulations of benchmark flows: (i) flow past a stationary cylinder; (ii) flow past an oscillating cylinder; and (iii) flow past a stationary elliptical cylinder, where Reynolds numbers are tested in the range 10–200. Our improved scheme is significantly more accurate and compares favourably with a staggered grid algorithm. We also develop a scheme to compute the boundary force for the direct‐forcing immersed boundary method efficiently. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

A local domain‐free discretization method for simulation of incompressible flows over moving bodies

This paper presents a local domain‐free discretization (DFD) method for the simulation of unsteady flows over moving bodies governed by the incompressible Navier–Stokes equations. The discretization strategy of DFD is that the discrete form of partial differential equations at an interior point may involve some points outside the solution domain. All the mesh points are classified as interior points, exterior dependent points and exterior independent points. The functional values at the exterior dependent points are updated at each time step by the approximate form of solution near the boundary. When the body is moving, only the status of points is changed and the mesh can stay fixed. The issue of ‘freshly cleared nodes/cells’ encountered in usual sharp interface methods does not pose any particular difficulty in the presented method. The Galerkin finite‐element approximation is used for spatial discretization, and the discrete equations are integrated in time via a dual‐time‐stepping scheme based on artificial compressibility. In order to validate the present method for moving‐boundary flow problems, two groups of flow phenomena have been simulated: (1) flows over a fixed circular cylinder, a harmonic in‐line oscillating cylinder in fluid at rest and a transversely oscillating cylinder in uniform flow; (2) flows over a pure pitching airfoil, a heaving–pitching airfoil and a deforming airfoil. The predictions show good agreement with the published numerical results or experimental data. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

A two‐step Taylor‐characteristic‐based Galerkin method for incompressible flows and its application to flow over triangular cylinder with different incidence angles

An alternative characteristic‐based scheme, the two‐step Taylor‐characteristic‐based Galerkin method is developed based on the introduction of multi‐step temporal Taylor series expansion up to second order along the characteristic of the momentum equation. Contrary to the classical characteristic‐based split (CBS) method, the current characteristic‐based method does not require splitting the momentum equation, and segregate the calculation of the pressure from that of the velocity by using the momentum–pressure Poisson equation method. Some benchmark problems are used to examine the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm and to compare with the original CBS method, and the results show that the proposed method has preferable accuracy with less numerical dissipation. We further applied the method to the numerical simulation of flow around equilateral triangular cylinder with different incidence angles in free stream. In this numerical investigation, the flow simulations are carried out in the low Reynolds number range. Instantaneous streamlines around the cylinder are used as a means to visualize the wake region behind, and they clearly show the flow pattern around the cylinder in time. The influence of incidence angle on flow characteristic parameters such as Strouhal number, Drag and Lift coefficients are discussed quantitatively. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

An improved ghost‐cell immersed boundary method for compressible flow simulations

This study presents an improved ghost‐cell immersed boundary approach to represent a solid body in compressible flow simulations. In contrast to the commonly used approaches, in the present work, ghost cells are mirrored through the boundary described using a level‐set method to farther image points, incorporating a higher‐order extra/interpolation scheme for the ghost‐cell values. A sensor is introduced to deal with image points near the discontinuities in the flow field. Adaptive mesh refinement is used to improve the representation of the geometry efficiently in the Cartesian grid system. The improved ghost‐cell method is validated against four test cases: (a) double Mach reflections on a ramp, (b) smooth Prandtl–Meyer expansion flows, (c) supersonic flows in a wind tunnel with a forward‐facing step, and (d) supersonic flows over a circular cylinder. It is demonstrated that the improved ghost‐cell method can reach the accuracy of second order in L¹ norm and higher than first order in L^∞ norm. Direct comparisons against the cut‐cell method demonstrate that the improved ghost‐cell method is almost equally accurate with better efficiency for boundary representation in high‐fidelity compressible flow simulations. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Use of two‐step split‐operator approach for 2D shallow water flow computation

The objective of this paper is to present a methodology of using a two‐step split‐operator approach for solving the shallow water flow equations in terms of an orthogonal curvilinear co‐ordinate system. This approach is in fact one kind of the so‐called fractional step method that has been popularly used for computations of dynamic flow. By following that the momentum equations are decomposed into two portions, the computation procedure involves two steps. The first step (dispersion step) is to compute the provisional velocity in the momentum equation without the pressure gradient. The second step (propagation step) is to correct the provisional velocity by considering a divergence‐free velocity field, including the effect of the pressure gradient. This newly proposed method, other than the conventional split‐operator methods, such as the projection method, considers the effects of pressure gradient and bed friction in the second step. The advantage of this treatment is that it increases flexibility, efficiency and applicability of numerical simulation for various hydraulic problems. Four cases, including back‐water flow, reverse flow, circular basin flow and unsteady flow, have been demonstrated to show the accuracy and practical application of the method. Copyright © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.