Passive Flow Control around Two Side-by-Side Square Cylinders Using a Control Plate

This article is concerned with the numerical analysis of reduction of fluid forces (drag and lift) and suppression of vortex shedding around two side-by-side square cylinders using the lattice Boltzmann method. For this purpose, a passive flow control methodology is adopted in which a flat plate (termed as the control plate) is placed at the upstream position of cylinders. The gap ratio (g) between the cylinders and the plate is varied from 0 to 4 while the height of the control plate is varied from 0.2 to 0.8 at fixed Reynolds number of 150. Different flow patterns are found in this study depending on the gap ratios and different heights of the control plate. These flow patterns are single bluff body flow, flip-flopping flow, and antiphase vortex shedding flow patterns. The narrow gap ratio (g = 0.5) is found to have more impact in terms of force reduction and flow control as compared to larger gap ratios. This article also shows that the fluid flow parameters such as the mean drag coefficient, the Strouhal number, and rms values of drag and lift coefficients of both cylinders reduce considerably due to the control plate as compared to without the control plate. In this regard, it is found that the mean drag coefficient of upper cylinder reduces upto 45.94%, the Strouhal number of both cylinders reduces upto 18.66%, while a maximum reduction of 83.47% and 95.39% is observed in root-mean-square values of drag and lift coefficients of upper cylinder, respectively. Another important finding of this article is that the control plate does not suppress forces and control flow at all gap ratios and heights of control plate considered in this article. In some cases, the flow-induced forces were found to be increasing as compared to without the control plate, and this generally happened at higher gap ratios.