Experimental investigation of a confined flow downstream of a circular cylinder centred between two parallel walls

In this work, we present an experimental study of the wall confinement effect on the wake formation behind a circular cylinder of diameter dc=10 mm and of length Lc=30dc. The experiments were performed in a water tunnel with the dimensions (length=300dc, height=3dc, span Lc=30dc). The confinement rate was r=1/3 and the Reynolds number was in the range of 30–277. The experiments were done using 2-D PIV measurements. The first instability was delayed by the confinement and the von Kármán vortices characteristics are different from the unconfined case. Proper orthogonal decomposition (POD) of the flow was used for a filtering purpose and to extract the energetic contribution of the different modes. A low-order representation of the flow, constructed from the first pair of modes in the well-defined region of the flow, shows that von Kármán vortices are equivalent to vanishing progressive waves. Measurements done above the cylinder show the presence of 3-D span instabilities showing great similarities with “Mode A” and “Mode B” found in the unconfined case.