Crossflow Over a Porous Circular Cylinder With Surface Blowing: CFD Analysis With Experimental Validation

Crossflow over a porous circular cylinder, with uniform blowing at the surface, was investigated experimentally and numerically. Two free stream conditions, Reynolds numbers 4,100 and 6,200, and five dimensionless blowing rate parameters (ratio of surface blowing to free stream velocity), 0.000 to 0.190, were studied experimentally. For simplicity, results for only one Reynolds number and three blowing cases are presented. A low speed wind tunnel was designed and constructed to give time-smoothed average velocities in the range of 61–122 cm/s. The tunnel was calibrated prior to the study. Velocity and pressure profiles were uniform up to 3.81 cm from the walls of the test section. Turbulence intensity, measured at the center of the test section, was 3.0% with an absolute error of 0.5%. Using hot wire anemometry, time-smoothed velocity profiles were measured at several radial and angular positions from the front to the rear stagnation point. The maximum absolute error in the velocity measurements was 12 cm/s and the positional error of the probe was 0.00254 cm. The numerical study employed the finite element method. The flow field was modeled as two-dimensional with half-symmetry. The unsteady, turbulent (k/ε) model had 2,160 elements and 2,287 nodes. Convergence and laminar flow was verified. When blowing was present, the numerical solution was found to give excellent agreement with the experiments in the entire flow field. For the no blowing test case, the agreement with the experiments was also excellent up to 20 deg from the rear stagnation point. Flow visualization, using smoke, was used to qualitatively study the large scale secondary flows in the wake region. These results helped explain the poorer agreement for the no blowing test case.