Laminar forced convection from a circular cylinder placed in a micropolar fluid

In this paper laminar forced convection associated with the cross-flow of micropolar fluid over a horizontal heated circular cylinder is investigated. The conservation equations of mass, linear momentum, angular momentum and energy are solved to give the details of flow and thermal fields. The flow and thermal fields are mainly influenced by Reynolds number Prandtl number and material parameters of micropolar fluid. The Reynolds number is considered up to 200 while the Prandtl number is fixed at 0.7. The dimension-less vortex viscosity is the only material parameter considered in this study and is selected in the range from 0 to 5. The study has shown that generally the mean heat transfer decreases as the vortex viscosity increases. The results have also shown that both the natural frequency of vortex shedding and the amplitude of oscillating lift force experience clear reduction as the vortex viscosity increases. Moreover the study showed that there is a threshold value for vortex viscosity above which the flow over the cylinder never responds to perturbation and stays symmetric without vortex shedding. Regarding drag coefficient, the results have revealed that within the selected range of controlling parameters the drag coefficient does not show a clear trend as the vortex viscosity increases.