Numerical study of the flow around cylinders with different cross sections via immersed boundary method

There are different numerical and experimental studies on the flow patterns around cylinders with various cross sections. However, there are only very few papers in which the effects of the cross sectional shape on the flow patterns around different cylinders are considered. This paper, therefore, provides a comparative study of the flow past cylinders with different cross sectional shapes using an immersed boundary method. The immersed boundary method used in this paper is a modified version of a direct forcing method in which the same functions employed in the continuous forcing methods are also used in interpolation and extrapolation processes. A specific approximation has also been used to determine the force at Lagrangian nodal points. All the simulations performed in this study are at Reynolds numbers 50, 100 and 150 and the results include vortex shedding and streamline diagrams as well as diagrams which show the variations of the lift and drag coefficients and Strouhal number. Computational results are satisfactory as compared to similar results reported in the literature.