Oscillating Cylinder in Laminar Crossflow – pimpleDyMFoam

In this post I am going to simulate an oscillating cylinder in a cross-flow… just for fun… and to provide an additional tutorial case for those wishing to use some of the dynamic meshing features of OpenFOAM.

The case I am going to simulate is a cylinder in a Reynolds number 200 cross-flow (U=2 m/s, D=1 m, nu = 0.01 m^2/s), oscillating at a rate of 0.2 hz.

Tutorial Files

The tutorial files for this case can be downloaded from here:

Download Tutorial Files

Please let me know if the download does not work or if there is a problem running the tutorial files. Note: I ran this case in parallel on a relatively fast 6-core computer. It will take a long time if you try to run it as single core.

Mesh Generation

For this simulation, I built a simple two dimensional O-grid around the cylinder which joined to a series of blocks making a rectangular domain. I built this using the native OpenFOAM meshing utility blockMesh (which I like a lot).

If you are wondering about the blockMesh set up… I intend to a blockMesh tutorial post… not that it’s all that necessary since the OpenFOAM manual covers it pretty well.

Case Set-up

dynamicMeshDict

When running a dynamic mesh case a solver runs as part of the solution and solves for the new grid at each timestep. Several are available in OpenFOAM and I am not really trying to do a full post on that right now. So I’ll just tell you that in this case I decided to use the displacementLaplacian solver.

Along with the solver one must define the coefficients that go with the solver. For most of the solvers this means setting the diffusivity for the Laplace solver. Since I am relatively new to these types of solutions I did what we all do… and turned to the great CFD online forum! A discussion in this post (http://www.cfd-online.com/Forums/openfoam-meshing/97299-diffusivity-dynamicmeshdict.htm) made me think that a good starting point would be the inverseDistance model for the mesh diffusivity.

In the end my dynamicMeshDict (which belongs in the constant folder) looked like:

dynamicFvMesh dynamicMotionSolverFvMesh;

motionSolverLibs ( "libfvMotionSolvers.so" );

solver displacementLaplacian;


displacementLaplacianCoeffs
{
      diffusivity inverseDistance 1(cylinder);
}

The solver produces the grid movements through time as the simulation is performed. Here is what the mesh looks like while it is moving! I added the stationary mesh and the moving mesh. Click on them to get a clearer picture 🙂

Boundary Conditions

The set up for this case is simple. An inlet boundary (on the far left) where I specified the incoming velocity and pressure (both are uniform fixedValue). The top and bottom boundaries are slip boundaries (but could also be freestream depending on your preferred set-up style).

The cylinder itself requires some special treatment because of the moving mesh. It must obey the no-slip condition right? So do we set it as uniform (0 0 0) ? No! The cylinder is moving! Luckily there is a handy boundary condition for this in the U file:

 cylinder
 {
      type movingWallVelocity;
      value uniform (0 0 0);
 }

For a typical simulation using pimpleFoam a p and U file would be all that are required. However, since we are doing a moving mesh simulation there is another parameter that must be solved for and requires boundary conditions… pointDisplacement.

For the pointDisplacement boundary conditions, we know that all of the outer edges should NOT move. Therefore they are all fixed with a type of fixedValue and  a value of uniform (0 0 0).

The cylinder however is moving and requires a definition. In this simulation we are simulating and oscillating cylinder. Since we are using the displacement solver the type is oscillatingDisplacement. We input and omega (rad/s) and an amplitude (m) in the following way:

 cylinder
 {
 type oscillatingDisplacement;
 omega 1.256; 
 amplitude (0 0.5 0); // Max piston stroke
 value uniform (0 0 0);
 }

Results

Yay! Now its time to look at the results. Well since I am not doing this for any particular scientific study… let’s look at some pretty pictures!

Here is an animation of vorticity:

Looks pretty nice! I personally have a big nerd love for vortex shedding…. I don’t know why.

Obviously if you intend to do any scientific or engineering work with this type of problem you would need to think very carefully about the grid resolution, diffusivity model, Reynolds number, oscillation frequency  etc. All of these were arbitrarily selected here to facilitate the blog post and to provide a nice tutorial example!

Conclusion

In this post I briefly covered the set-up of this type of dynamic meshing problem. The main difference for running a dynamic mesh case is that you require a dynamic mesh solver (you must specify in the dynamicMeshDict), and you also require boundary conditions for that solver.

Let me know if there are any problems with this blog post or with the tutorial files provided.