Grid convergence study on flow past a circular cylinder for beginners

Abstract

Flow past a stationary circular cylinder is the fundamental problem of interest in fluid mechanics. Numerical simulations were performed for two dimensional viscous incompressible flow past a circular cylinder at Reynolds number (Re) 100. The objective is to show the detailed way of grid convergence study for CFD beginners in ANSYS Fluent using the basic problem. The minimum domain size and the minimum number of nodes on the body required to achieve convergence was found. The numerical results obtained was validated with existing researches. The mesh convergence test was performed on the grid. The optimal grid that helps to achieve accurate results with minimal computational time was concluded.