Numerical Study on Drag Reduction for Flow Past a Circular Cylinder

When an object passes through a stationary fluid or fluid passes around an object, a resistive force acts on the object called drag. In most of the situations, this drag force is undesirable and needs to be decreased even if it is not possible to eliminate it entirely. Drag forces predominantly occur on bluff bodies. It has been found that the interaction of vortices leads to an increase in pressure drag, which is the largest contributor of drag acting on a bluff body like cylinder. This problem is commonly encountered in engineering applications like windmill towers, underwater bridge columns, offshore oil rig structures, transmission towers. Therefore, the objective of this research is to study the variation of drag force acting on a cylinder. This is possible by attaching splitter plates of varying lengths both upstream and downstream to the flow and parallel to the cylinder. It is found that attaching a splitter plate upstream and downstream reduces the drag by 19.03%