Detailed investigation of detached-eddy simulation for the flow past a circular cylinder at re=3900

The flow past a circular cylinder at a subcritical Reynolds number 3900 was simulated by the method of detached-eddy simulation (DES). The objective of this present work is not to investigate the physical phenomena of the flow but to study modeling as well as numerical aspects which influence the quality of DES solutions in detail. Firstly, four typical spanwise lengths are chosen and the results are systematically compared. The trend of DES results along the span increment is different from previous large-eddy simulation (LES) investigation. A wider spanwise length does not necessary improve the results. Then, the influence of mesh resolution is studied and found that both too coarse and over refined grids will deteriorate the performance of DES. Finally, different orders of numerical schemes are applied in the inviscid fluxes and the viscous terms. The discrepancies among different schemes are found tiny. However, the instantaneous flow structures produced by 5th order WENO with 4th order central differencing scheme are more abundant than the others. That is, for the time-averaged quantities, the second-order accurate schemes are effective enough, whereas the higher-order accurate methods are needed to resolve the transient characteristics of the flow.