Stability of a circular cylinder oscillating in uniform flow or in a wake

Abstract

The lift and drag forces were measured on both a single circular cylinder and tandem circular cylinders in uniform flow at Reynolds numbers from 40 to 104, to investigate the stability of an oscillating cylinder. A cylinder (the downstream one in the tandem case) was made to oscillate in either the transverse or longitudinal direction (perpendicular or parallel to the stream). In the case of a single cylinder, its oscillation causes the so-called synchronization in a frequency range around the Strouhal frequency (transverse mode) or double the Strouhal frequency (longitudinal mode). The aerodynamic damping for transverse oscillation becomes negative in the synchronization range. In the case of tandem cylinders, at low Reynolds numbers in the pure Kármán range synchronization was observed to occur only when the downstream cylinder oscillated inside the vortex-formation region of the upstream one, and at high (low subcritical) Reynolds numbers synchronization occurred irrespective of the cylinder spacing in either oscillating mode. In the tandem case, too, the transverse oscillation of the downstream cylinder becomes unstable in the range of synchronization.