Re-examination of laminar flow over twin circular cylinders in tandem arrangement

Viscous fluid flow past two identical circular cylinders in a tandem arrangement is numerically investigated at a typical Reynolds number of 200. By considering a large span of spacing ratio (0.1 ⩽ G/D ⩽ 6.0) with a fine interval of 0.1 or less, the dependences on the spacing ratio of the drag force, lift force, lift fluctuation frequency, torque on the cylinder pair and phase difference between the lift fluctuations of the two cylinders are investigated in detail, where D is the diameter of the cylinder and G the surface-to-surface distance between the cylinders. The phase difference between the lift fluctuations of the two cylinders is addressed based on correlation analysis together with the phase diagram, which has received scarce attention before. The phase difference provides further understanding to the dependence of the wake evolutions behind the twin circular cylinders. The numerical investigations show that diverse regimes can be identified according to the dependence of the hydrodynamics on the spacing ratio. The hydrodynamic discontinuities at G/D = 0.9, which have previously been ignored, are reported in this work. The physical correlations between the hydrodynamic discontinuities and the wake patterns are presented. (paper)