Flow Interference between a Circular (Upstream) and a Square Cylinder: Flow Pattern Identification

In this paper, flow interference between an upstream circular cylinder and a square cylinder of equal size is studied in tandem arrangement. The main objective of this invesigation is to identify the possible flow patterns at different spacing ratios, L/B where L is the centre-to-centre distance between the cylinders and B is the characteristic dimension of the bodies. All the experiments are conducted in a water channel and the test Reynolds number is 2100 (based on B). L/B is varied from 1.0 to 5.0. The flow visualization experiments are videographed and then analyzed frame-by-frame to capture the finer details of the flow patterns. Flow over single square and circular cylinders is analyzed first. Then, flow interference between two circular cylinders is investigated. Subsequently, flow over a circular-square configuration is investigated. No such studies are reported so far. Different flow patterns are observed for the circular-square configuration. Additionally, the time of persistence of each flow pattern have been recorded over a sufficiently long period of time to see the most dominant flow pattern. The schedule of occurrence of flow patterns have also been studied during this investigation. This study is very much relevant in the context of possible interference effects occuring in engineering structures such as buildings, heat exchanger tubes etc.