Forced Convection Fluid Flow and Heat Transfer Across a Bluff Body of Square Cross-Section :Effects of Reynolds Number and Blockage Ratio

Owing to its theoretical and industrial relevance, flow and heat transfer around sharp edged bluff bodies (cylinders of non-uniform cross-sections) have been the topic of research from many years. The problem under consideration has the variety of engineering applications such as electronic cooling, compact heat exchange systems, offshore structures and flow metering devices, etc. In this paper, forced convection fluid flow and heat transfer characteristics around a horizontal (heated) square cylinder are investigated  for the following range of conditions: Reynolds number, Re = 50 – 150, blockage ratio, BR = 12.5%, 30% and 50% and Prandtl number, Pr = 0.7 (air) in the unsteady regime. The governing continuity, Navier-Stokes and energy equations along with appropriate boundary conditions are solved by using commercial CFD solver Fluent (6.3). The non-uniform computational grid structure is generated in Gambit, a pre-processor to Fluent. The present results are found to be in an excellent agreement with the results available in the open literature. It is observed that as the value of the blockage ratio increases the drag coefficient increases for the range of physical parameters considered here.