Vortex shedding suppression for laminar flow past a square cylinder near a plane wall: a two-dimensional analysis

Summary A numerical study on the uniform shear flow past a long cylinder of square cross-section placed parallel to a plane wall has been made. The cylinder is considered to be within the boundary layer of the wall. The maximum gap between the plane wall to the cylinder is taken to be 0.25 times the cylinder height. We investigated the flow when the regular vortex shedding from the cylinder is suppressed. The governing unsteady Navier-Stokes equations are discretized through the finite volume method on staggered grid system. A pressure correction based iterative algorithm, SIMPLER, has been used to compute the discretised equations iteratively. We found that the critical value of the gap height for which vortex shedding is suppressed depends on the Reynolds number, which is based on the height of the cylinder and the incident stream at the surface of the cylinder. At high Reynolds number (Re ≥ 500) however, a single row of negative vortices occurs for wall to cylinder gap height L ≥ 0.2. The shear layer that emerges from the bottom face of the cylinder reattaches to the cylinder itself at this gap hight.