Vorticity annihilation and inviscid blocking in multibody flows

Abstract

Many environmental and processing engineering flows consist of collections of fixed or moving bodies (such as buildings, plants, bubbles and droplets). These flows may be unbounded or bounded high Reynolds number flows through groups of bodies, such as crop ‘canopies’ or buildings in the atmospheric boundary layer, boiler tubes in a furnace, flows through moving objects such as icebergs in the ocean, or bubble swarms in pipes. Examples of buildings in the urban terrain are given in Chapters 2 and 8, while plant canopies are described in Chapters 4 and 6. For many problems, the goal is to model the impact of many bodies on the ambient flow. There is an intrinsic complexity to modelling the flow through and around a group of bodies and estimating the flow signature they generate. In many cases, the huge number of bodies and the range of geometrical lengthscales (eg. from leaf size, to tree size, up to a forest scale, for plant canopies) means that traditional computational models, where the whole flow domain is meshed and solved numerically, are not able to include all the geometrical aspects [596]. As such, average descriptors, such as a distributed drag force introduced into