Fluidelastic Instability of Heat Exchanger Tube Bundles: Review and Design Recommendations

Abstract

Fluidelastic instability is the most important vibration excitation mechanism for heat exchanger tube bundles subjected to cross-flow. Most of the available data on this topic have been reviewed from the perspective of the designer. Uniform definitions of critical flow velocity for instability, damping, natural frequency and hydrodynamic mass were used. Nearly 300 data points were assembled. We found that only data from experiments where all tubes are free to vibrate are valid from a design point of view. In liquids, fluid damping is important and should be considered in the formulation of fluidelastic instability. From a practical design point of view, we conclude that fluidelastic instability may be expressed simply in terms of dimensionless flow velocity and dimensionless mass-damping. There is no advantage in considering more sophisticated models at this time. Practical design guidelines are discussed.

Development of a time delay formulation for fluidelastic instability model

“…Some excellent reviews on the subject are provided by Paidoussis (1983), Price (1995),D. t. Weaver and Fitzpatrick (1988), Pettigrew and Taylor (1991, 2003a, 2003b and Chen (1984).…”

“…It is well known that heat transfer benefits from cross-flow, but higher vibration levels and the possibility of flowinduced instabilities arise. Many incidents of failure in commercial steam generators due to the undesirable vibrations with large amplitudes have been reported (Pettigrew & Taylor, 1991).…”

“…Figure 1-1 : Vibration amplitude of a flexible tube versus pitch flow rate (Pettigrew & Taylor, 1991) . (Price & Paidoussis, 1984).…”

“…(Pettigrew & Taylor, 1991) Several theoretical or semi-empirical models have been developed to predict the critical velocity for fluidelastic instability. These include the quasi-static (Blevins, 1974;Connors, 1970), quasisteady (Price & Paidoussis, 1984), quasi-unsteady models (Granger & Paidoussis, 1996;Meskell, 3 2009), the analytical channel flow model (Lever & Weaver, 1982) and the unsteady model (Chen, 1987;Tanaka & Takahara, 1981).…”

Numerical Study of Tube-Bundle Flow-Induced Vibrations With Multiphase-Pod Approach

“…Particularly, tube bundle systems in the steam generator part are prone to fretting-wear or even breaking, mainly due to transverse flow-induced vibration problems [4,7,8,13,18,25,23,24]. But, as well as experiments, numerical simulations of fluid-structure interactions in a tube bundle system remain very costly [5,15,28] : in order to give a relevant description of the flow and of the structure displacements, it is necessary to construct a system with a large number of degrees of freedom.…”