A cell boundary element method applied to laminar vortex-shedding from arrays of cylinders in various arrangements

A cell boundary element method is used to solve the two-dimensional incompressible Navier-Stokes equation for vortex-shedding flows around arrays of cylinders. The method is a hybrid scheme using a boundary element method in each fluid cell discretization with a finite element procedure to solve for the global fluid problem. Computations are presented of two-dimensional flow characteristics and interactive forces associated with flows around four equispaced cylinders of equal diameter, and two cylinders, one with circular cross-section and the other elliptical. It was found that behaviour such as in-phase vortex-shedding, anti-phase vortex shedding and synchronized vortex shedding, which are well-known characteristics for flows past arrangements of two circular cylinders, were also present in these more complicated flows. The application of the cell boundary element method to these flow problems, using an unstructured fluid domain mesh idealization, proved straightforward and required no modification for variation of the number of bodies or their shape. (C) 2000 Academic Press.