• DECEMBER 2019

Cricket Ball Moving Through Air

Qualitative Discussion of Static Pressure

• In this example, we simulated how air flows over

a cricket ball moving at high speeds.
• Let's begin our analysis of results by looking at
the pressure contours.
• The figure on the right shows the pressure
contours on the surface of the ball and on the
midplane.
• As we can see from the plot, there is a high-
pressure region in the front of ball. This is due to
the incoming air that is brought to a complete
halt on the surface of the ball facing the flow.
• As the air flows around the ball, it accelerates
around the curved surface, leading to a reduction
in pressure shown by the blue region.
Qualitative Discussion of Velocity field
• The contour plots below show the wall shear stresses on the surface of the ball and the velocity contours along
the midplane.
• As mentioned earlier, the velocity contour plot shows the air being brought to a complete halt upfront and then
subsequently accelerates as it flows over the curved surfaces.
• We can also see the wall shear stresses on the ball surface due to the friction between the air flow and the wall.

Velocity Magnitude

Stress
Shear
Wall
Wall Shear
Stress

Velocity Magnitude

Flow Direction
Flow field around a cricket ball
• Velocity vectors plotted on the midplane show the stagnation point on the upstream surface where the flow
comes to a stop, then turns and flows along the curvature of the sphere, accelerating in the process.

Flow Direction
Stagnation Point

• If we zoom into the front of the ball, we can see the stagnation point.
• Resolved boundary layer along sphere surface can also be seen.

Flow Direction
Flow Separation
• Due to the curvature of the ball and the high Reynolds number, the flow separates from the surface as
shown below.

Direction of Flow
Turbulent Wake

• The flow separation creates a turbulent wake downstream of the sphere as shown below.

Flow Direction
Summary

• In this example you learned how to simulate flow around a

cricket ball.

• You also learned various post processing tools that can be

used to analyze simulated flow field.

8
 Appendix
Cricket Ball Moving Through Air

9
Steady treatment of an unsteady problem
• This problem is inherently 3D and unsteady, for which a
true steady state solution does not exist.
• In order to simplify the problem and reduce the
computational cost two simplifications were made:
‐ Symmetry is assumed about the midplane
‐ Problem is treated as a steady state problem
• After approximately 1000 iterations, we see that the

𝐶𝐷
residuals and monitors settle to a quasi-oscillatory state
as the calculation proceeds.
• Pseudo-transient solution can be considered as a crude
inaccurate transient and the results can be used for a
qualitative understanding of the flow.
• For more accurate and high fidelity results please use a
fully transient simulation.
FMG Initialization
• Full Multigrid (FMG) initialization is used to obtain better
initial solutions to complex flow problems.
• In this problem we used FMG initialization to obtain an
appropriate initial solution in order to help accelerate the
convergence.
Hybrid Initialization
• During FMG initialization, the inviscid Euler equations are
solved using first order discretization to obtain an
approximate solution.
• This initialization can be performed from the Fluent console
using the following TUI command:
solve/initialize/fmg-initialization yes
FMG Initialization

Final Solution