Bifurcation phenomenon in Newtonian Fluid Flows through a Symmetric Sudden Expansion

The aim of the present study is to numerically investigate the bifurcation phenomenon in two dimensional sudden channel expansions. The numerical work is carried out using FLUENT, a commercial Computational Fluid Dynamics package. It uses the finite-volume method to solve the governing equations for a fluid. Geometry and grid is created using GAMBIT which is the preprocessor bundled with FLUENT. The working fluid used is di-ethylene glycol for steady, incompressible and laminar flow region. The present study shows that the re-attachment length and the size of re-circulation zones depend on the expansion ratio and Reynolds number