Wall Effect on Separated Flow Around an Inclined Flat Plate at High Incidence

Abstract

The flow around bluff bodies has received a great deal of attention due to its practical importance in engineering and scientific relevance in fluid mechanics. The largely separated turbulent flow can be triggered by an inclined flat plate with sharp leading and trailing edge and the presence of wall can alternate the flow structures greatly. This paper applied the Unsteady Reynolds-averaged Navier-Stokes (URANS) model to simulate the vortex shedding phenomenon over the inclined flat plate for a Reynolds number Re = 20 000 with different angle of attack α and gap ratio D/L, the ratio of the distance from the plate to the wall (D) to the plate length (L). Vortex generation from the leading and trailing edge was captured clearly and the transportation and development of vortex structures were shown for different parameters. The smaller the gap ratio is, the more the flow characteristics are affected by the wall presence. The integral quantities, such as lift and drag coefficients show different peak values for different angle of attack.