Flow around a cylinder

Problem description

In this analysis we will simulate the potential flow around a cylinder. For this analysis I used OpenFOAM 2.1.x, release for Windows.

The problem consists in a 2D squared domain with a cylinder at the center; the fluid flows from left to right with a velocity of 1.0 m/s and goes directly into the atmosphere. Given the problem is symmetric, we will model only the upper side and apply a symmetry BC on the lower surface; the upper wall is considered no slip wall.

The flow is considered incompressible, steady, irrotational,inviscid and ignores gravity; therefore the employed solver will be potentialFoam.

Mesh generation

The domain is sliced into regions as shown below:

The resulted mesh is the following:

Boundary conditions and initial fields

left patch is inlet velocity, zeroGradient pressure; right patch is pressure outlet, zeroGradient velocity; all other patches are slip walls and are set as symmetry.

Running the case

Some errors appear when running this case; make sure you set the inlet (left patch) as $type \ fixedValue; value \ uniform \ (1 \ 0 \ 0);$ After running this with potentialFoam solver, a $U$ field is populated and the we can plot the velocities.

Results

The contour plot of the velocities:

The streamlines plot of the velocities:

In a potential flow the streamlines do not intersect.