ABSTRACT
The fluid flow across bluff bodies (e.g., cylinders) has numerous applications such as offshore platforms, heat exchangers, suspension bridges, flow metering devices, cooling of electronic components and equipments, flow dividers in polymer processing applications, etc. In spite of all this, very little is known about the flow and heat transfer characteristics of cylinders of non-circular cross-sections. In this work, the two-dimensional steady incompressible flow over a long equilateral triangular cylinder has been investigated in an unconfined configuration. The numerical simulations have been carried for the range: Reynolds numbers = 10 and 25 and Prandtl number = 0.7 (Air) by using commercial solver Fluent in the steady cross-flow regime. The computational grid consists of non-uniform quadrilateral cells' having the fine grid points in the regions of large gradients and the coarser grid points in the regions of low gradients is generated in the commercial grid generator Gambit. The second order upwind scheme has been used to discretize convective terms in the momentum and the equation equations. The semi-implicit method for the pressure linked equations (SIMPLE) is used for the pressure-velocity coupling. The present results are found to be in an excellent agreement with those reported for the triangular cylinder in the open literature. The flow field is visualized by way of stream-line, velocity magnitude and pressure profiles. The temperature field is presented by isotherm plots. The wake length, drag and Nusselt number have been calculated for the range of conditions covered here. The drag coefficient decreases with increasing Reynolds number.
Keywords: Drag, Nusselt number, Triangular cylinder, steady regime.
