Numerical simulation of flow past a tapered cylinder

The unsteady three-dimensional low Reynolds number flow past a tapered cylinder is computed. The spanwise variation in natural shedding frequency results in interesting three-dimensional flow phenomena. The computed hot-wire and spectral data are very similar to experimental results. The computation was done on the Connection Machine, a massively parallel computer; highlights of the capabilities of the Connection Machine for computation and visualization of three-dimensional unsteady flow fields are shown.