Effect of an aligned current on the stability of oscillatory incompressible flow past a circular cylinder

The stability of incompressible flow past a circular cylinder under collinear steady and oscillatory forcing is investigated within a two-dimensional Floquet framework.

The flow is parameterised by the Keulegan-Carpenter number $KC \in [4,12]$, the steady-to-oscillatory velocity ratio $m \in [0,1]$, and the oscillatory Reynolds number $Re_m \in [20,100]$.

The loci of the leading Floquet multipliers, and hence case-specific bifurcation modes, are examined by progressively reducing $Re_m$ to subcritical values for prescribed $m$.

A steady current with $m > 0.5$ gives rise to a period-doubling subharmonic bifurcation that does not occur in purely oscillatory flow, where only synchronous and quasi-periodic modes arise.

For $Re_m = 100$, three key features are discernible.

First, the neutral stability curve in $(KC,m)$ space is strongly non-monotonic in $m$, separating intrinsically stable regions from those with single unstable modes; a sub-region of striking mode re-stabilisation appears beyond $m \approx 0.9$, where the flow recovers a $Z_2$-symmetric state at peak Reynolds number $\approx 190$, despite the steady and oscillatory components each being individually unstable.

Second, a distinct regime supports the coexistence of two unstable modes of different types.

Third, complementary direct numerical simulations show that, for a single unstable mode, the linear analysis successfully predicts the saturated nonlinear state even when $Re_m = 100$ substantially exceeds the critical Reynolds number, whereas under mode coexistence the quasi-periodic attractor tends to dominate the developed dynamics.