Visualization of Cylinder Flow Unsteady Behavior (via https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XSzWPn2fZ90)
Still trying to figure out the cause of the spikes in our first data set, we hypothesized that it may be the result of an unsteady behavior. Though this video only characterizes the velocity field around a cylinder, we can apply Bernoulli’s Equation to relate these changes to pressure variation.
Notice that at the top and bottom of the cylinder (in other words 90° and 270°) the velocity and pressure change quickly close to the surface. We thought that it may have been possible that the spikes in our plots were results of the wide variation of pressure with time at these locations. Since the LabView program was averaging 10 samples for every recorded value, our data values could have been greatly skewed by a few outliers. As such, we considered changing the data sampling rate and rerunning the experiment.