Influence of Inflow Turbulence on the Flow Characteristics around a Circular Cylinder
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
The article deals with the experimental research of flows over a circular cylinder at different Reynolds numbers and with several inlet turbulence intensities. Authors bring new results concerning the effects of inlet turbulence intensity on the drag and lift coefficient as well as on the correlations of pressure at upper and lower side of the cylinder.
The article is well written with clear structure. The results sounds reasonable (higher level of turbulence shifts the separation and reduces the drag in the supercritical regime). Therefore I recommend the article for publication after resolving following issues:
the text has to be checked by a native English speaker. There are some suspicious constructions like the sentence at line 21, "steel members" (line 29, probably should be steel parts), "well" at line 53 (should be probably better), "two kinds of diameter" at line 78 and so on. Note that I'm not a native speaker and therefore I can't judge the language level of the article. The work deals with the experimental investigation of unsteady pressure but authors do not give any details on the instrumentation. Authors should add at least brief description of measurement devices together with some indication of the accuracy of the devices. Authors do not give any indication of measurement uncertainties (see also point 2) What is the meaning of H at the Fig. 2? It has to be explained somewhere. typos in Reynolds numbers at line 319, 321, and 326 (1.04x105 should be 1.04x10^5, and so on) probably wrong reference to Fig 15 at line 340. It should refer probably to Fig 21
Author Response
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Author Response File: 
Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 2 Report
The paper describes a set of measurements of the effect of the inflow turbulence on the pressure distribution on a circular cylinder. The paper is well written and shows interesting results. The analysis has been performed appropriately and a large set of interesting quantities have been extracted from the measurements. However, the paper is very descriptive at the moment, since it is basically a collection of plots with a brief discussion for each one of them. The author should make an effort to improve the quality of the discussion in order to summarize the outcome of the study and provide to the reader a more clear, overall message. Before I can recommend publication, the following questions and improvements should be answered and appropriate modifications included in the paper.
Page 3: The effect of confinement with the two plates should be discussed in more details. The authors refer to a Chinese publication which is not very useful for many readers. A summary of the effect of confinement and the reason for the specific choice of the ratio between the cylinder diameter and length should be included. Figure 1 should be improved. It is hard to get useful information from this picture. Maybe a drawing of the object would me more useful. Page 4: It would be useful to include some additional quantity for the characteristics of the incoming turbulence. It would be good to know what it the turbulent Reynolds number of the incoming flow (either based on the integral or Taylor scale), its integral scale, and the Kolmogorov scale. This might be relevant to compare the scales of the incoming turbulence with respect to the characteristic scale of the cylinder which might make a difference in the outcome of the measurements. I assume that the authors measured the incoming flow in some way to comput the turbulent intensity reported in Fig 2. The same data could be used to compute the quantities mentioned above. Page 4: Cp should be defined explicitly. The conditions in Figure 3 should be mentioned (Reynolds number) In all the figure where the x axis is the Reynolds number, it would be useful to mark the regimes (critical, supercritical, etc) Figure 5: Is there an explanation of the peak of theta_b =160 at Re=4.5x10^5? What is it happening around this range of Re? It would be good to provide figures of Cp as function of alpha (similar to Fig 3) for different Re around and at this peak. As said before, the paper it is too descriptive, without a deep discussion of the interesting results. A discussion of the sharp transition at Re=3.5x0^5 observed in Fig 5-8 would be beneficial for the reader. Figures similar to Fig 3 could be used. Again, it would be good to add a set of Figures similar to Fig 3 ( Cp as function of alpha) for the different cases at different turbulent intensity. I would suggest 4 figures, each figure containing the Cp as function of alpha for all cases at different intensity, for Re=6.2x10^4; 1x10^5; 2x10^5; 4x10^5. Figure 14 seems incomplete for the present measurements. Why C_D is not reported for Re>3x10^5? In Figure 15, a big difference appears between the present measurements and those of Cheug and Melbourne at large Re. The authors should discuss this discrepancy in more details. Page 14 and 15: the discussion on the correlation is very interesting, but very hard to follow. It would be good to include one or more sketches of the flow around the cylinder for the different Reynolds numbers. This would facilitate the reader in the understanding of the phenomena that are occurring for increasing Reynolds numbers. Beginning of section 6.1 and 6.2. The word “inconsistent” is used at the beginning of both this paragraph. I could not understand what the authors mean by that. Probably this should be rephrased.
Author Response
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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Round 2
Reviewer 2 Report
The authors have addressed my previous comments. The paper can be published.
Author Response
New version of the manuscript has been uploaded.
