The Biharmonic Approach for Unsteady Flow Past an Impulsively Started Circular Cylinder

Abstract

In this paper, a newly developed second order temporally and spatially accurate finite difference scheme for biharmonic semi linear equations has been employed in simulating the time evolution of viscous flows past an impulsively started circular cylinder for Reynolds number (Re) up to 9,500. The robustness of the scheme and the effectiveness of the formulation can be gauged by the fact that it very accurately captures complex flow structures such as the von Kármán vortex street through streakline simulation and the α and β-phenomena in the range 3,000≤Re≤9,500 among others. The main focus here is the application of the technique which enables the use of the discretized version of a single semi linear biharmonic equation in order to efficiently simulate different fluid structures associated with flows around a bluff body. We compare our results, both qualitatively and quantitatively, with established numerical and more so with experimental results. Excellent comparison is obtained in all the cases.