Numerical investigation of pressure distribution on cylindrical structures in grouped configuration

Abstract

With a modern-day aptness in architecture to build slender structures with low natural frequencies, wind loading often constitutes the critical design load. Wind is being one of the major forces responsible for the unfortunate failure and loss of life. Therefore, it requires accurate evaluation and prediction of wind loads and proper mitigations are very important in order to reduce the adverse effects of wind. This will provide practical knowledge for estimation of wind load at various point on cylindrical surfaces. The effect of wind action on cylindrical tank structures have carried out at two different Reynolds number 6.1×104 and 8.6×104 respectively, in this work by numerically to evaluate the pattern of pressure distribution on the wall of cylinder which is shielded by another cylindrical tank under various configurations. Results shows that the angle of incidence flow strongly influence the flow patterns, and therefore the pressure distribution on the wall of cylinders.

The test model selected here for numerical analysis are the group of four cylindrical tanks placed on the vertices of equilateral triangle to create interference effect on the object model which is placed at the centroid of the triangle and hence to find out the wall pressure distribution. The test variables include angle of incidence, spacing ratio (N/d), free stream velocity and the models of varying configuration.

The success of computational fluid dynamics (CFD) in area of aeronautical engineering is praiseworthy. In this paper, we use ANSYS-FLUENT, a computational fluid dynamics (CFD) code to find out the pressure distribution on cylindrical surface and the pressure distribution over the roof of the cylindrical structure.