Numerical study on three-dimensional flow around a cylinder with perforated shrouds at different Reynolds numbers

The perforated shrouds have been proposed to control cylinder flows, while the effects and mechanisms at different Reynolds numbers (Res) remain unclear. Three-dimensional numerical simulations are conducted in this paper to compare the aerodynamic performance of the flow around a smooth cylinder and a shrouded cylinder at Re of 3900 and 1.4×105. The results indicate that the drag of the perforated shrouded cylinder is reduced by 30.8% at the high Re, while increased by 26% at Re of 3900 compared with the smooth cylinder. Differently, the lift oscillations of the cylinder are greatly weakened by 83.3% at the Re of 3900 and 98.5% at the Re of 1.4×105, which implies the wake oscillations are nearly eliminated at the Re of 1.4×105. Further analysis exhibits the near wake region is elongated along the mainstream, with significantly recovered pressure. Especially, the greater pressure loss owing to outer shrouds even leads to the negative drag of the inner cylinder at the high Re. In addition, the incoming flow is broken up by outer shrouds, and different flow patterns appear in the gap. The discernible vortex pairs occur in the gap at the Re of 3900, while as Re increases to 1.4×105, the quantities of small-scale vortex weaken the impact on the inner cylinder. The shear layer characteristics are elucidated by Lamb vector curl and Kelvin–Helmholtz instabilities. The vorticity stretching and tilting in the shear layer of the shrouded cylinder is much weaker at the high Re. Generally, the energy for shear layer instabilities at low frequencies is diminished with the presence of perforated shrouds. However, the energy at higher frequencies is strengthened at the low Re.