Transient flow around an impulsively started cylinder using a dynamic mesh method

The finite volume method (FVM) with a dynamic mesh method (DMM) to deal with the moving boundary was applied to the simulation of two-dimensional incompressible viscous flow past a circular cylinder that is impulsively started into rotation and translation. The non-dimensional rotating to translating speed ratio α is varied from 0.28 to 2.07, with the Reynolds number being 200 for the range of α. The computation covers a period, during which the cylinder translates seven times its diameter. The current scheme handles the impulsively moving boundary directly by DMM, which is implemented using both mesh deforming and local remeshing. The instantaneous asymmetrical flow configurations for various α are presented and compared with the experimental visualizations. Quantitatively, the velocity distributions with drag and lift coefficients are also compared with the experimental and numerical results. Results show that the flow is strongly influenced by the rotation. Comparisons are found to be satisfactory.