Vortex dislocation in the near wake of a cylinder with span-wise variations in diameter

Abstract

We examined the evolution of three-dimensional vortex shedding patterns induced by spanwise variations of the cylinder diameter. Two distinct types of shedding patterns have identified through flow vi sualization: continuous (in-phase) oblique shedding where vortices shed with lower frequency stay attached to the vortices with higher frequency without any discontinuity or splitting and discontinuous (out-of-phase) shedding where the lower frequency vortices have no attachment to higher frequency vortices and vortex dislocation occurs. The dislocation seen in the flow is strongly influenced by th e span wi se ir regularities. We ob served a clear and strong in-phase spanwise vortex shedding for the three smooth cylinder configurations tested in the study. The tapered, bumps and steps configurations showed sections of strong coherent spanwise vortex shedding, and we identified hardly any coherent structures for the rib, sinusoidal, and helical configurations. Depending on the geometry and number of span wise irregularities, incoherent structures make difficult to determine the occurrence and location of vortex dislocations in the cylinder wake without a method that enables a reduction in the complexity. Here, we introduce a numerical approach that obtains the dominant structures of vortex shedding patterns by reducing the complexity in noisy data. The method maps the variations in the oblique shedding angle over time and provide quantitative conclusions on the intermittent occurrence and location of vortex dislocations in the 15 000 snapshots taken for each of the different cylinder geometries regardless of turbulence.