Effect of Exit Plane Boundary Conditions on Time Accurate Computations

Effects of boundary conditions on the computational simulation of time dependent flows is studied. In particular, the effect of various boundary conditions for the flow over a half circular cylinder which is known to exhibit periodic shedding under certain conditions is investigated. A type of convection boundary condition called the radiation boundary condition is demonstrated to eliminate the secondary frequency which contaminates the solution due to the partial reflection of the fluid structures at the exit plane. However, the boundary condition implementation comes at the additional cost of storing results corresponding to three time levels.