Simulation of vortex dynamics in a cylinder wake by the Immersed Boundary technique

The dynamics of flow past a circular cylinder is investigated at Reynolds number (Re) between 20 and 3900 using the rectangular mesh. The Re is defined based on the cylinder diameter D and the free-stream velocity U-infinity. This is achieved by using the Immersed Boundary (IB) method that helps to impose boundary conditions on a given surface not coinciding with the computational grid. Two interpolation techniques, namely bi-linear proposed by the authors and unidirectional quadratic by Muldoon and Acharya (2005), are compared for both the laminar and the turbulent flow regime. The unsteady Navier Stokes (N-S) equations are solved using a symmetry-preserving finite-difference scheme of second-order spatial and temporal accuracy. Large-Eddy Simulations (LES) with the dynamic subgrid model are used to resolve the turbulent flow at Re = 1000 and 3900. When compared with experiments, it reveals that the IB method is worth pursuing and both the interpolations generate almost identical results for a wide range of Reynolds numbers. The bi-linear interpolation is easy to implement and take less computational time because of its simplicity.