Impact of the lateral mean recirculation characteristics on the near-wake and bulk quantities of the BARC configuration

The high-Reynolds number flow around a rectangular cylinder, having streamwise to crossflow length ratio equal to 5 is analyzed in the present paper. The flow is characterized by shear-layer separation from the upstream edges. Vortical structures of different size form from the roll-up of these shear layers, move downstream and interact with the classical vortex shedding further downstream in the wake. The corresponding mean flow is characterized by a recirculation region along the lateral surface of the cylinder, ending by mean flow reattachment close to the trailing edge. The mean flow features on the cylinder side have been shown to be highly sensitive to set-up parameters both in numerical simulations and in experiments. The results of 21 Large Eddy Simulations (LES) are analyzed herein to highlight the impact of the lateral mean recirculation characteristics on the near-wake flow features and on some bulk quantities. The considered simulations have been carried out at Reynolds number Re=DU_∞/ν=40 000, being D the crossflow dimension, U_∞ the freestream velocity and ν the kinematic viscosity of air; the flow is set to have zero angle of attack. Some simulations are carried out with sharp edges (Mariotti et al. 2017), others with different values of the rounding of the upstream edges (Rocchio et al. 2020) and an additional LES is carried out to match the value of the roundness of the upstream edges in the experiments in Pasqualetto et al. (2022). The dimensions of the mean recirculation zone vary considerably in these simulations, allowing us to single out meaningful trends. The streamwise length of the lateral mean recirculation and the streamwise distance from the upstream edge of its center are the parameters controlling the considered quantities. The wake width increases linearly with these parameters, while the vortex-shedding non-dimensional frequency shows a linear decrease. The drag coefficient also linearly decreases with increasing the recirculation length and this is due to a reduction of the suctions on the base. However, the overall variation of C_D is small. Finally, a significant, and once again linear, increase of the fluctuations of the lift coefficient is found for increasing the mean recirculation streamwise length.