Numerical investigation of power-law flow past two side-by-side identical circular cylinders

The non-Newtonian flow past multiple cylinders is widely encountered in engineering applications, such as slurry transport, petroleum drilling, and heat transmission systems using hot kerosene. However, the wake characteristics of non-Newtonian flow past multiple cylinders are far from well understood. This paper reports the numerical results of power-law flow past two side-by-side identical circular cylinders with a various gap ratio (G/D = 1.1–6.0) and a power-law index (n = 0.8–1.5) at a fixed Reynolds number (Re = 100) based on the incoming uniform flow velocity. Six wake patterns are identified, including the single bluff-body regime, deflected regime, in-phase regime, anti-phase regime, and two subclasses of flip-flopping regime (FF1 and FF2 regimes). The hydrodynamic coefficients of two cylinders are sensitive to both the gap ratio and the power-law index. The wake structure evolution is closely related to the wake patterns, and six modes of wake evolution are accordingly observed. Since the apparent viscosity of power-law fluid changes with the shear rate, the distribution of local Reynolds number (ReL) around the cylinder surface varies with the wake pattern. As it goes outward along the normal direction from the cylinder surface, the ReL shows a trend of increasing and then decreasing when n < 1, while the opposite trend is observed when n > 1.