Towards a quantitative comparison between global and local stability analysis

A methodology is proposed here to estimate the stability characteristics of bluff-body wakes using local analysis under the assumption of weakly non-parallel flows. In this connection, a generalisation of the classic spatio-temporal stability analysis for fully three-dimensional flows is first described. Secondly, an additional higher-order correction term with respect to the common saddle-point global frequency estimation is included in the analysis. The proposed method is first validated for the case of the flow past a circular cylinder and then applied to two fully three-dimensional flows: the boundary layer flow over a wall-mounted hemispherical body and the wake flow past a fixed spher…