Drag Coefficient for Stokes Flow

Although the flow around a sphere is a problem well-understood at all ranges of Reynolds number, the flow around a cylinder is an unresolved problem at creeping flow conditions. At creeping flow, Reynolds number is small, typically less than one. Because flows with such small Reynolds numbers are important academically, the focus of this research was to examine them by finding their drag coefficient. The drag coefficient is another crucial number since it relates directly to the drag force. To carry out this task successfully, designing an efficient mesh was the first step. Results for the drag coefficient for flow around a cylinder have been dependent on the domain thus far. Hence, to make the results domain-independent, a mesh with an element size ratio of 1:1 was drawn out by hand. Then, the design was programmed using MATLAB. That code was transferred to another mesh-producing software, which generated the desired mesh on the computer. The mesh code had to be flexible to ensure that the results obtained were not dependent on the domain. This flexibility allowed the addition of numerous transitions, which alter the size of the mesh. The greater the number of transitions, the larger the mesh.