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The flow topology of the wake behind a circular cylinder at the super-critical Reynolds number of Re = 7.2 × 105 is investigated by means of large eddy simulations. In spite of the many research works on circular cylinders, there are no studies concerning the main characteristics and topology of the near wake in the super-critical regime. Thus, the present work attempts to fill the gap in the literature and contribute to the analysis of both the unsteady wake and the turbulent statistics of the flow. It is found that although the wake is symmetric and preserves similar traits to those observed in the sub-critical regime, such as the typical two-lobed configuration in the vortex formation zone, important differences are also observed. Owing to the delayed separation of the flow and the transition to turbulence in the attached boundary layer, Reynolds stresses peak in the detached shear layers close to the separation point. The unsteady mean flow is also investigated, and topological critical points are identified in the vortex formation zone and the near wake. Finally, time-frequency analysis is performed by means of wavelets. The study shows that in addition to the vortex shedding frequency, the inception of instabilities that trigger transition to turbulence occurs intermittently in the attached boundary layer and is registered as a phenomenon of variable intensity in time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Deposition of polydisperse particles representing nasal spray application in a human nasal cavity was performed under transient breathing profiles of sniffing, constant flow, and breath hold. The LES turbulence model was used to describe the fluid phase. Particles were introduced into the flow field with initial spray conditions, including spray cone angle, insertion angle, and initial velocity. Since nasal spray atomizer design determines the particle conditions, fifteen particle size distributions were used, each defined by a log-normal distribution with a different volume mean diameter (Dv50). Particle deposition in the anterior region was approximately 80% when Dv50 > 50μm, and this decreased to 45% as Dv50 decreased to 10μ m for constant and sniff breathing conditions. The decrease in anterior deposition was countered with increased deposition in the middle and posterior regions. The significance of increased deposition in the middle region for drug delivery shows there is potential for nasal delivered drugs to reach the highly vascularised mucosal walls in the main nasal passages. For multiple targeted deposition sites, an optimisation equation was introduced where deposition results of any two targeted sites could be combined and a weighting between 0 to 1 was applied to each targeted site, representing the relative importance of each deposition site. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is concerned with the numerical simulation of fluid–structure interaction problems involving an incompressible viscous flow and an elastic structure. A semi-implicit coupling technique is presented which strongly couples the added-mass term of the fluid (pressure stress) to the structure, while the remaining terms are only loosely coupled. A thorough numerical analysis is carried out to verify the accuracy of the proposed method by comparing its results to experimental data and other numerical results from the literature. The performance and accuracy of the proposed method are also compared against a fully implicit coupling technique. Numerical tests show that semi-implicit coupling significantly reduces the computational cost of the simulations without undermining either the stability or the accuracy of the results. The question of implicit or explicit coupling of the dynamic mesh step is addressed by evaluating its effect on the overall accuracy and performance of the semi-implicit method. The implicit coupling of the dynamic mesh step is found to slightly improve the accuracy, while significantly increasing the computational cost. Moreover a comparison is made on the performance of the semi-implicit method with different interface solvers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A novel multiple marker level-set method is introduced for Direct Numerical Simulation of deformable fluid particles (bubbles and droplets), which is integrated in a finite-volume framework on collocated unstructured grids. Each fluid particle is described by a separate level-set function, thus, different interfaces can be solved in the same control volume, avoiding artificial and potentially unphysical coalescence of fluid particles. Therefore, bubbles or droplets are able to approach each other closely, within the size of one grid cell, and can even collide. The proposed algorithm is developed in the context of the conservative level-set method, whereas, surface tension is modeled by the continuous surface force approach. The pressure–velocity coupling is solved by the fractional-step projection method. For validation of the proposed numerical method, the gravity-driven impact of a droplet on a liquid–liquid interface is studied; then, the binary droplet collision with bouncing outcome is examined, and finally, it is applied on simulation of gravity-driven bubbly flow in a vertical column. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]