EFFECT OF ROTATION RATES ON THE LAMINAR FLOW AND HEAT TRANSFER PAST A CIRCULAR CYLINDER

In this work, forced convection heat transfer past a rotating circular cylinder with a constant non-dimensional rotation rate a varying from 0 to 6 was investigated for Reynolds numbers of 20-200 and a Prandtl number of 0.7. The numerical calculations are carried out by using a finite-volume method based commercial computational fluid dynamics solver FLUENT. The successive changes in the flow pattern are studied as a function of the rotation rate. Suppression of vortex shedding occurs as the rotation rate increases (alpha > 2). A second kind of instability appears for higher rotation speed where a series of counter-clockwise vortices is shed in the upper shear layer. The rotation attenuates the secondary instability and increases the critical Reynolds number for the appearance of this instability. In addition, time-averaged (lift and drag coefficients and Nusselt number) results were obtained and compared with the literature data. A good agreement was obtained for both the local and averaged values.