Simulation of the flow past a circular cylinder using an unsteady panel method

•The in-house UnSteady Double Wake Model USDWM is presented in the manuscript.•Sub-, super-, and trans-critical cylinder flows have been successfully simulated.•The results show a good comparison between USDWM, URANS, and experiments.•USDWM is capable of capturing the dynamics of the flow.•USDWM is capable of capturing changes in St, Cd and Cp for the three regimes. In the present work, an in-house UnSteady Double Wake Model (USDWM) is developed for simulating general flow problems behind bodies. The model is presented and used to simulate flows past a circular cylinder at subcritical, supercritical, and transcritical flows. The flow model is a two-dimensional panel method which uses the unsteady double wake technique to model flow separation and its dynamics. In the present work the separation location is obtained from experimental data and fixed in time. The highly unsteady flow field behind the cylinder is analyzed in detail. The results are compared with experiments and Unsteady Reynolds-Averaged Navier Stokes (URANS) simulations and show good agreement in terms of the vortex shedding characteristics, drag, and pressure coefficients for the different flow regimes.