Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference on Hydroscience and Engineering, Philadelphia, PA, September 2006. http://hdl.handle.net/1860/732Flows past a free surface piercing cylinder are studied numerically by large eddy simulation (LES)
at Froude numbers up to FrD=2.0 and Reynolds numbers up to ReD=1.105. A two-phase FCT-VOF
method is employed to simulate the air-water interface. The effects of the free surface on vortex
structure in the near wake are particularly investigated. The loadings on the cylinder at various
Reynolds and Froude numbers are also studied.
Computation results show the free surface inhibits the vortex generation in the near wake, and
this effect is stronger at higher Froude numbers, nevertheless, it is attenuated as the Reynolds
number increases. It is also found that the strong three dimensionality in the near wake at higher
Froude numbers affects the force distribution dramatically along the cylinder, whereas variation in
the Reynolds number has no significant effect