A fundamental study to characterize the flow around an oscillating cylinder in a pulsatile flow environment is investigated. This work is motivated by a new proposed design of the total artificial lung (TAL), which is envisioned to provide better gas exchange. The Navier-Stokes computations in a moving frame of reference were performed to compute the dynamic flow field surrounding the cylinder. Cylinder oscillations and pulsatile free-stream velocity were represented by two sinusoidal waves with amplitudes A and B and frequencies ωc and ω, respectively. The Keulegan-Carpenter number (Kc=Uo/Dωc) was used to describe the frequency of the oscillating cylinder while the pulsatile free-stream velocity was fixed by imposing ω/Kc=1 for all cases investigated. The parameters of interest and their values were amplitude (0.5D