Generalizing Prediction of Bluff Body Aerodynamic Load Maps Available to Purchase

The Continuous Rotation method enables efficient definition of all aerodynamic load components on bodies of arbitrary shape for arbitrary attitudes. This is applied to several bluff body shapes including cylinders, a cuboid, a flat plate and a porous box. Rate effects and unsteadiness are shown to be negligible using a cylinder of aspect ratio 1. The genesis of the side force on the yawed cylinder, and the differences between rough and smooth cylinders, are derived from comparisons between experiments and diagnostic computations with an unsteady Navier-Stokes solver. Interpolating Fourier coefficients of the azimuthal load variation appears to be viable to generalize loads on cylinders of varying aspect ratio. A large variation is seen for aspect ratio 0.5 to 1, with a more gradual transition to ‘high aspect ratio’ features beyond aspect ratio 2.