A Spectral Solenoidal-Galerkin Method for Flow Past a Circular Cylinder

摘要

Flow past a circular cylinder embodies many interesting features of fluid dynamics as a challenging fluid phenomenon. In this preliminary study, flow past a cylinder is simulated numerically using a Galerkin procedure based on solenoidal bases. The advantages of using solenoidal bases are twofold: first, the incompressibility condition is exactly satisfied due to the expansion of the flow field in terms of the solenoidal bases and second, the pressure term is eliminated in the process of Galerkin projection onto solenoidal dual bases. The formulation is carried out using a mapped nodal Fourier expansion in the angular variable while a modal polynomial expansion is used in the radial variable. A variational approach to recover the pressure variable is also presented. Some numerical tests are performed.