One-way and two-way couplings of CFD and structural models and application to the wake-body interaction

Abstract

The current study focuses on the wake-body interaction of a circular cylinder, whose transverse free vibration is modeled by a mass-spring-damper system coupled to a computational fluid dynamics (CFD) model for the flow and wake. We first simulate the free vibration of the elastically-mounted cylinder and the wake, and analyze the transverse load it exerts on the cylinder and its phase with the vibration. We vary the damping by three orders of magnitude and examine the difference in the wake-body interaction for slightly-damped and highly-damped systems. We then use the spectral properties of the free vibration and use them to construct two different types of forced vibrations: one consists only of the fundamental component of the free vibration, and the other accounts for all spectral properties of it. We compare the wake load for each type to that corresponding to the free vibration. The forced vibrations correspond to a one-way coupling and the information is communicated from the CFD model to the structural model, whereas the free vibration corresponds to a two-way coupling of the models. By comparing the spectral properties of the wake load, including the phase relation of its components with the vibration, which we obtained for the free vibration and for the equivalent forced vibration, we identify the effects of the wake feedback. The findings show that a forced vibration does not reproduce exactly the wake load at small and intermediate levels of structural damping. As the damping increases, the vibration changes from being in-phase with the wake load to being 90° out-of-phase with it, corresponding to two different wake states, and the forced vibration gives wake load that is very close to the one occurring in the case of full wake-body interaction.