We consider a twisted cylinder that was designed by rotating the elliptic cross-section along the spanwise direction, resulting in a passive control. The flow over the twisted cylinder is investigated at a subcritical Reynolds number (Re) of 3000 using large eddy simulation based on the finite volume method. For comparison, the flow past smooth and wavy cylinders is also calculated. The twisted cylinder achieves reductions of approximately 13 and 5 % in mean drag compared with smooth and wavy cylinders, respectively. In particular, the root mean square (r.m.s.) value of the lift fluctuation of the twisted cylinder shows a substantial decrease of approximately 96 % compared with the smooth cylinder. The shear layer of the twisted cylinder covering the recirculation region is more elongated than those of the smooth and wavy cylinders, and vortex shedding from the twisted cylinder is considerably suppressed. Consequently, the elongation of the shear layer from the body and the near disappearance of vortex shedding in the near wake with weak vortical strength contributes directly to the reduction of drag and lift oscillation. Various fundamental mechanisms that affect the flow phenomena, three-dimensional separation, pressure coefficient, vortex formation length and turbulent kinetic energy are examined systematically to demonstrate the effect of the twisted cylinder surface. In addition, for the twisted cylinder at $\mathit{Re}=3000$ , the effect of the cross-sectional aspect ratio is investigated from 1.25 to 2.25 to find an optimal value that can reduce the drag and lift forces. Moreover, the effect of the Reynolds number on the aerodynamic characteristics is investigated in the range of $3\times 10^{3}\leqslant \mathit{Re}\leqslant 1\times 10^{4}$ . We find that asReincreases, the mean drag and the r.m.s. lift coefficient of the twisted cylinder increase, and the vortex formation length decreases.

This study investigates natural convection in a cooled square enclosure with two inner heated circular cylinders with the same diameter. The centers of two equidiameter cylinders are placed at those of the lower and upper half of the enclosure, respectively. The immersed boundary method (IBM) to model the inner circular cylinders based on the finite volume method is used to study a two-dimensional natural convection for different Rayleigh numbers varying in the range of 10³ ≤ Ra ≤ 10⁵. The effect of the radius of inner circular cylinders in an enclosure on heat transfer and fluid flow at different Rayleigh numbers has been examined. As the Rayleigh number increases, the horizontal symmetry is broken and the asymmetry occurred from the smaller radius. As the radius decreases, the dependence of the convection on the Rayleigh number is considerable. The dependence of the Nusselt number on the radius and the Rayleigh number is presented.

The present study considered the geometric disturbance inspired by a harbor seal vibrissa of which undulated surface structures (HSV) are known as a detecting device to capture the water movement induced by prey fish. As an original research can extend to the flow control based on the biomimetic, this study aims at finding the effect of the angle of attack (AOA) on flow characteristics around the harbor seal vibrissa shaped cylinder, to cover the change of flow direction during the harbor seal’s movements and surrounding conditions. Therefore, we considered a wide range of AOA varying from 0 to 90 degree. We carried out large eddy simulation (LES) to investigate the flow around inclined vibrissa shaped cylinder for the Reynolds number (Re) of 500. The elliptic cylinder is considered for the purpose of the comparison. The difference of force coefficients between the HSV and the elliptic cylinder can be classified into three regimes of one large variation region, two invariant regimes according to AOA. In contrast to the elliptic cylinder showing the monotonically decrease of the vortex shedding frequency in AOA, the HSV reveals the increasing and then decreasing behavior of the vortex shedding frequency along the AOA. The same decreasing profile of the vortex shedding frequency means that the HSV lost the unique function on the vortex shedding frequency. The shear layers for the HSV is much longer than that of shear layers for the elliptic cylinder at low angles of the attack. With increasing AOA, the difference of the vortical structures in the wake between the HSV and the elliptic cylinder becomes minor. Thus, it can be concluded that as AOA increases, the bluff body flow overcomes the flow induced by the HSV shape, resulting in the appearance of almost the same flow with the elliptic cylinder.

We propose a new geometric disturbance called a variable pitch helically twisted elliptical (VPHTE) cylinder that was obtained by combining helically twisted elliptic (HTE) and asymmetric geometries for passive flow control. We confirmed that the new geometric disturbance reduces the drag and lift fluctuations compared with the smooth and HTE cylinders at the Reynolds number (Re) of 3000. Large eddy simulation was used for the evaluation of the flow control performance of the VPHTE cylinder at Re = 3000, which corresponds to the subcritical regime. A parametric study was conducted on the variable pitch ratio (VP). The smallest value of the time-averaged drag coefficient of the VPHTE cylinder is lower by about 16.7% and 4.1% than those of the smooth and HTE cylinders, respectively. Furthermore, a VPHTE cylinder reduces the root-mean-square value of the lift coefficient by 96.2% compared with a smooth cylinder. The vortex formation length related to the stabilization of the shear layer of the VPHTE cylinders is longer than those of the smooth and HTE cylinders, and it is consistently elongated as the VP increases. In addition, time-averaged pressure coefficients for different cylinders were compared to analyze the reason for the drag reduction. We systematically investigated the additional flow control performance of the VPHTE cylinders and VP effects by analyzing physical values such as the swirl strength, turbulent kinetic energy, and vorticity components around the VPHTE cylinders.