Numerical simulation of flow over two side-by-side circular cylinders

In the present paper, the unsteady, viscous, incompressible and 2-D flow around two side-by-side circular cylinders was simulated using a Cartesian-staggered grid finite volume based method. A great-source term technique was employed to identify the solid bodies (cylinders) located in the flow field and boundary conditions were enforced by applying the ghost-cell technique. Finally, the characteristics of the flow around two side-by-side cylinders were comprehensively obtained through several computational simulations. The computational simulations were performed for different transverse gap ratios (1.5≤T/D≤4) in laminar (Re = 100, 200) and turbulent (Re = 104) regimes, where T and D are the distance between the centers of cylinders and the diameter of cylinders, respectively. The Reynolds number is based on the diameter of cylinders, D. The pressure field and vorticity distributions along with the associated streamlines and the time histories of hydrodynamic forces were also calculated and analyzed for different gap ratios. Generally, different flow patterns were observed as the gap ratio and Reynolds number varied. Accordingly, the hydrodynamic forces showed irregular variations for small gaps while they took a regular pattern at higher spacing ratios.