Flow past a circular cylinder between parallel walls at low Reynolds numbers

The flow about a circular cylinder placed centrally inside a channel is studied numerically with an unstructured collocated grid finite volume method based on the primitive variable formulation. The distance between the channel walls is allowed to vary to change the blockage ratio. Simulations are carried out over a range of Reynolds numbers that are consistent with the two-dimensional assumption. The study confirms that transition to vortex shedding regime is delayed when the channel walls are close to the cylinder because of the interaction between the vortices from the channel wall and cylinder wake. In the unsteady vortex shedding regime, the wake pattern is opposite to the classic Karman street in respect of the positions of the shed vortices. The cylinder drag coefficient and Strouhal number are considerably increased at smaller gaps while the root-mean-squared lift coefficient is significantly decreased. Several important flow parameters are correlated with the input parameters, namely Reynolds number and blockage ratio.