Similarities of Flow and Heat Transfer around a Circular Cylinder

Abstract

Modeling fluid flows is a general procedure to handle engineering problems. Here we present a systematic study of the flow and heat transfer around a circular cylinder by introducing a new representative appropriate drag coefficient concept. We demonstrate that the new modified drag coefficient may be a preferable dimensionless parameter to describe more appropriately the fluid flow physical behavior. A break in symmetry in the global structure of the entire flow field increases the difficulty of predicting heat and mass transfer behavior. A general simple drag model with high accuracy is further developed over the entire range of Reynolds numbers met in practice. In addition, we observe that there may exist an inherent relation between the drag and heat and mass transfer. A simple analogy model is established to predict heat transfer behavior from the cylinder drag data. This finding provides great insight into the underlying physical mechanism.

Keywords

• circular cylinder
• analogy
• appropriate drag coefficient
• drag model
• heat transfer
• entire range of Reynolds numbers