Aerodynamic characteristics of rectangular cylinders with corner cuts

The flow around a structure has been an important research subject in the wind engineering research community around the world. There are various kinds of unstable aerodynamic phenomena with regard to a bluff body. In order to understand the physical mechanism of aerodynamic and aeroelastic instability of a bluff body, the relations between the flow around structures and the motion of body with various section shapes should be investigated. Based on a series of wind tunnel tests, this paper addresses the aerodynamic characteristics of rectangular cylinders with various sizes of corner cuts in the uniform flow of different attack angles. The test results show that the models with corner cuts produced generally better behavior for the galloping phenomenon than the original section. However, the corner cut method cannot prevent the occurrence of the vortex-induced vibration(VIV). It is also shown that as the attack angle changes, the optimum size of corner cut changes also. This means that any one specific size of corner cut which shows the best aerodynamic behaviors throughout all the cases of attack angles does not exist. This paper presents an intensive study on obtaining the optimum size of corner cut for the stabilization of aerodynamic behavior of rectangular cylinders.