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No Matter How You Slice It: A Study of Flow Regimes Around Wedges
Student-Run Research| Speaker: | Michael Lewis, UC Davis |
| Location: | 1147 MSB |
| Start time: | Wed, Nov 4 2026, 2:10PM |
Description
In the classical problem of fluid flow around a circular cylinder, one can observe qualitative transitions in the properties of the flow field depending on the Reynolds number (Re), which measures the ratio of inertial to viscous forces in the fluid. Very low Re fluid produces steady flows, with a pair of vortices emerging behind the cylinder at around Re = 5 and periodic vortex shedding at Re = 40. We examine a tasty spin on this problem by taking wedge-shaped slices of the circle (pizza!) and see whether the transition regions in the classical problem change depending on the size of the slice.