Large-scale dynamics in the flow around a finite cylinder with a ground plate

To date, physically meaningful representations of the nonstationarity in complex 3D flows with converged turbulent statistics are scarce and shed little light on the nonlinear processes in turbulent motion. This study attempts to address part of this deficit by concentrating on the kinematics of larger scales of motion. Two methods are utilized to describe the kinematics of large-scale unsteady motion in the flow around a wall-mounted finite circular cylinder at Reynolds number Re-D = 200 000. The first, Proper Orthogonal Decomposition (POD), is a global method resulting in spatial modes defined over the whole domain and their corresponding temporal coefficients. The second, Coherent Structure Tracking (CST), belongs to a class of local methods that extracts connected domains in the flow data. Modes specific for distinct harmonics are extracted by temporal harmonic filtering. Based on time coefficients of the dominant mode pairs provided by POD or harmonic filtering, phase-averaging has been performed. A scalar-field version of CST is proposed, yielding an intuitively more accessible description of the flow. The extent to which POD and CST are complementary is discussed, as well as the extent to which they partially overlap. The combination of POD, filtering, phase-averaging and CST allowed for identification and quantification of important flow patterns in a complex turbulent flow field.