Flow solutions around rectangular cylinders: The question of spatial discretization

The aerodynamics of blunt bodies with separation at the sharp corner of the leading edge and reattachment on the body side are particularly important in civil engineering applications. In recent years, a number of experimental and numerical studies have become available on the aerodynamics of a rectangular cylinder with chord-to-thickness ratio equal to 5 (BARC). Despite the interest in the topic, a widely accepted set of guidelines for grid generation about these blunt bodies is still missing. In this work a new, well resolved Direct Numerical Simulation (DNS) around the BARC body at Re=3000 is presented and its results compared to previous DNSs of the same case but with different numerical approaches and mesh. Despite the simulations use different numerical approaches, mesh and domain dimensions, the main discrepancies are ascribed to the different grid spacings employed. While a more rigorous analysis is envisaged, where the order of accuracy of the schemes are kept the same while grid spacings are varied alternately along each spatial direction, this represents a first attempt in the study of the influence of spatial resolution in the Direct Numerical Simulation of flows around elongated rectangular cylinders with sharp corners.