Effect of Cylinder Arrangement on Fluid Flow and Heat Transfer Characteristics past Four Elliptic Cylinders

Abstract

Fluid flow and heat transfer characteristics past four elliptic cylinders arranged in square configuration are numerically investigated in this study. An in-house finite element method code based on streamline upwind Petrov - Galerkin algorithm has been used for simulations of two-dimensional, incompressible and laminar flow of air. Analyses are carried out by changing geometric parameters such as spacing ratio, axis ratio and incident angle. Results in terms of vorticity and temperature contours, Strouhal number, drag and lift coefficients and Nusselt number are studied for all cases. These results show that fluid flow patterns are strongly influenced by geometric parameters, based on which flow can be categorized into different types. A critical spacing ratio is found for some of the configurations, where a steep increase in drag coefficient is encountered. From this study, it is observed that incident angle 22.5 degree gives a higher heat transfer rate compared to the other two configurations (0 and 45 degree). Also, elliptic cylinders (axis ratio of 0.8 and 0.5) have similar Nusselt number value with less drag force compared to circular cylinders (axis ratio of 1.0) which justifies the utilization of elliptic cylinders as an alternative for circular ones.

Acknowledgements

All the numerical simulations were carried out on the Virgo Super Cluster at the High Performance Computing Environment facility, Indian Institute of Technology Madras. The authors would like to express their gratitude to the P.G. Senapathy Center for Computing Resource, IIT Madras, for providing the facilities required to run the numerical simulations.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Vivek Puliyeri

Vivek Puliyeri is a PhD scholar at the Department of Applied Mechanics, Indian Institute of Technology Madras. His research area is fluid flow and heat transfer past elliptic cylinder arrangements using finite element method.

Sankaranarayanan Vengadesan

Sankaranarayanan Vengadesan is a Professor at Indian Institute of Technology Madras. He received his PhD from Graduate School of Science & Technology, Kobe University, Japan. His research interest includes development of computational fluid dynamics code for laminar flows/turbulent flows, RANS / LES, applications to fluid structure interaction, heat transfer studies, multiphase flow, bio-fluid and unsteady aerodynamics.

Karaiyan Arul Prakash

Karaiyan Arul Prakash is a Professor at the Indian Institute of Technology Madras. He received his PhD degree from Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur. His research interests include computational fluid dynamics and heat transfer, cooling technologies, thermal hydraulics, large eddy simulations and related techniques.