Flow-induced oscillations of a cantilevered pipe conveying fluid with base excitation

Abstract

It is known that a plain cantilevered pipe conveying fluid loses its stability by a Hopf bifurcation, leading to either planar or non-planar flutter for flow velocities beyond the critical flow velocity for Hopf bifurcation. If an external mass is attached to the end of the pipe (an end-mass), the resulting dynamics become much richer, showing 2D and 3D quasiperiodic and chaotic oscillations at high flow velocities. In this paper, a cantilevered pipe, with and without an end-mass, subjected to a small-amplitude periodic base excitation is considered. A set of three-dimensional nonlinear equations is used to analyze the pipe׳s response at various flow velocities and with different amplitudes and frequencies of base excitation. The nonlinear equations are discretized using the Galerkin technique and the resulting set of equations is solved using Houbolt׳s finite difference method. It is shown that for a plain pipe (with no end-mass), non-planar post-instability oscillations can be reduced to planar periodic oscillations for a range of base excitation frequencies and amplitudes. For a pipe with an end-mass, similarly to a plain pipe, three-dimensional period oscillations can be reduced to planar ones. At flow velocities beyond the critical flow velocity for torus instability, the three-dimensional quasiperiodic oscillations can be reduced to two-dimensional quasiperiodic or periodic oscillations, depending on the frequency of base excitation. In all these cases, a low-amplitude base excitation results in reducing the three-dimensional oscillations of the pipe to purely two-dimensional oscillations, over a range of excitation frequencies. These numerical results are in agreement with the previous experimental work.