T-Shaped Control Plate Effect on Flow past a Square Cylinder at Low Reynolds Numbers

In this study, the influence of the T-shaped control plate on the fluid flow characteristics around a square cylinder for a low Reynolds numbers flow is systematically presented. The introduction of upstream attached T-shaped control plate is novel of its kind as T-shaped control plate used for the first time rather than the other passive control methods available in the literature. The Reynolds numbers (Re) are chosen to be Re = 100, 150, 200, and 250, and the T-shaped control plate of the same width with varying length is considered. A numerical investigation is performed using the single-relaxation-time lattice Boltzmann method. The numerical results reveal that there exists an optimum length of T-shaped control plate for reducing fluid forces. This optimum length was found to be 0.5 for Re = 100, 150, and 200 and 2 for Re = 250. At this optimum length, the fluctuating drag forces acting on the cylinder are reduced by 134%, 1375, 133%, and 136% for Re = 100, 150, 200, and 250, respectively. Instantaneous and time-averaged flow fields were also presented for some selected cases in order to identify the three different flow regimes around T-shaped control plate and square cylinder system.