Instability of the separated shear layer in flow past a cylinder: Forced excitation

The receptivity of the separated shear layer for Re = 300 flow past a cylinder is investigated by forced excitation via an unsteady inflow. In order to isolate the shear layer instability, a numerical experiment is set up that suppresses the primary wake instability. Computations are carried out for one half of the cylinder, in two dimensions. The flow past half a cylinder with steady inflow is found to be stable for Re = 300. However, an inlet flow with pulsatile perturbations, of amplitude 1% of the mean, results in the excitation of the shear layer mode. The frequency of the perturbation of the inlet flow determines the frequency associated with the shear layer vortices. For a certain range of forced frequencies the recirculation region undergoes a low‐frequency longitudinal contraction and expansion. An attempt is made to relate this instability to a global mode of the wake determined from a linear stability analysis. Interestingly, this phenomenon disappears when the outflow boundary of the computational domain is shifted sufficiently downstream. This study demonstrates the need of carefully investigating the effect of the location of outflow boundaries if the computational results indicate the presence of low‐frequency fluctuations. The effect of Re and amplitude of unsteadiness at the inlet are also presented. All computations have been carried out using a stabilized finite element formulation of the incompressible flow equations. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.