Upper bound for von Karman Vortex Street?

Question

I'm trying to see if I can find any literature on this specific question, but a few days of scholarly digging has been fruitless.

Given a 5" round pipe with a bluff body inserted, is there an upper bound for the Reynolds number at which the von Karman Vortex Street is no longer discernible? It seems to me that the vortices would be shed so close to the bluff body that they would be covered up by eddies in a turbulent flow (Say, R_e >=100,000).

Answer 1

I have a limited understanding of the subject, having investigated it for a specific project some while ago. That said -

I understand that the general 'opinion' is that well below Re = 100,000 turbulence effects will dominate and that Vortex Street formation will not be detectable.

This excellent 2013 article The Kármán Vortex Street - Chuck Bodeen wanders around the subject in general and has some specific comments relevant to your question plus some relevant links.

Along the way he notes:

• This means that the vortex street begins to form at the “critical” Reynolds Number (about 40), and that, for Re above 400, turbulence in the flow shatters the regular pattern of the “street”. Another source puts the critical number at 90 and some say 100. The Reynolds number beyond which turbulence destroys the vortex street may be even higher than 400 in certain cases. A video from the Earth System Sciences laboratory at the University of California, Irvine, shows that vortex streets can form behind cylinders at Reynolds numbers around 2,000, but that turbulence dominates at Re 15,000.

However, to both confuse and inform, he cites this study Vortex Shedding from a Ground Tracking Radar Antenna and 3D Tip Flow Characteristics which investigates vortex shedding at well over Re=100,000.

Answer 2

This is from examples given in the An Album of Fluid Motion 5th, 1997.

I don't know of a web address to get these images, so I will just repeat what is said about a couple of the images.

Figure on Table of contents - Karman vortex street behind a circular cylinder "The Reynolds number is about 300, which is near the upper limit for stability."
Figure 47 - Circular cylinder at R=2,000 "At this Reynolds number one may properly speak of a boundary layer ... turbulent wake."

Based on this, the Vortex Street disappears into the turbulence somewhere after R_e= 2,000.