Investigation on Fluidelastic Instability Accompanied by Wake Shedding With a Time-Domain Model

Abstract

As the most dangerous flow-induced vibration (FIV) mechanism, fluid-elastic instability is always accompanied by the wake shedding. If both of the two FIV mechanisms are considered, fluid forces in this condition can be quite complex. In this paper, a time-domain model based on unsteady flow theory was used to investigate the fluid-elastic instability in a rotated triangular tube array. The vortex shedding forces were simplified as harmonic forces. Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) was used to get the fluid force coefficients with vortex shedding. The model was established by a finite element code with MATLAB software and simulation results agreed with the experiment results. The results showed the critical instability velocity can be influenced by vortex shedding forces, and double peaks can be found in the frequency spectrum of displacements of tubes. The time-domain displacements showed the phases had been impacted by the shedding and periodic characteristic was found in the displacements results. The model can also be adopted in fluid-elastic instability analysis in other tube arrangements and flow conditions.