High Order Accurate Solution of Flow Past a Circular Cylinder

A high order method is applied to time-dependent incompressible flow around a circular cylinder geometry. The space discretization employs compact fourth-order difference operators. In time we discretize with a second-order semi-implicit scheme. A large linear system of equations is solved in each time step by a combination of outer and inner iterations. An approximate block factorization of the system matrix is used for preconditioning. Well posed boundary conditions are obtained by an integral formulation of boundary data including a condition on the pressure. Two-dimensional flow around a circular cylinder is studied for Reynolds numbers in the range 7 ≤ R ≤ 180. The results agree very well with the data known from numerical and experimental studies in the literature.