Effect of surface curvature on destabilization and unsteadiness of low-Re flow across two tandem elliptic cylinders

This work performed a direct simulation investigation on two-dimensional flow across two tandem elliptic cylinders at Re = 100. The cylinders are placed with a center-to-center distance D/d = 2-10 where d is the diameter, and the minor-to-major axis ratio, denoted as aspect ratio AR, varies as AR = 0.25-1.00. The objective of this study is to quantitatively identify the effect of surface curvature of the cylinders, as represented by AR, and the separating distance on the destabilization and unsteadiness of flow. Numerical results reveal that the local surface curvature at the ends of major axis of the cylinder has substantial influence on the separation and detachment of boundary layer flow on the leeward side of the upstream cylinder, determines the characteristics of gap flow, perturbs the flow around the downstream cylinder, and finally produces various patterns of wake flow. As AR increases, the gap flow tends to be stabilized for small separating distance and even quasi-steady flow for the AR = 0.75 and 1.00 cylinders at D/d = 2; the wake flow after the downstream cylinder also gets less unstable and only sheds in the far-wake region. The non-uniformity of time-averaged pressure coefficient around the downstream cylinder is reduced but the fluctuating amplitude increases, while the flow around the upstream cylinder is quite close to that of the single cylinder case.