Drag reduction through oscillating a circular cylinder rotationally is optimized. The optimization is performed by combining a CFD solver with a global deterministic optimization algorithm. The use of this optimization tool allows for a rapid determination of the rotational amplitude and frequency domains that yield minimum drag. We observe that the rotational oscillations significantly affect the pattern of shedding vortices and find that the mean drag is decreased at the relatively higher forcing frequencies. The results show that there is a threshold of the rotational oscillation amplitude below which the mean drag does not decrease for any excitation frequency.
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