Special Section on Flow-Induced Vibrations

Abstract

The ASME-PVP Symposium on Flow-Induced Vibration provides a valuable forum for researchers and engineers in industry to share and discuss new developments in the effort to better understand and improve designs against flow-induced vibrations. Most recently Symposia were held in Atlanta, in 2001, Cleveland, 2003, Denver, 2005, and San Antonio, in 2007. The Symposium on Flow-Induced Vibration 2009, held in Europe for the first time, was a sequel to this series of FIV symposia held since 1977. This was one of the most successful Symposia attracting 60 submissions from around the world with a final 45 papers presented.Flow-induced vibration is still the cause of many costly failures in nuclear power plants and process industries. Reasonably reliable design guidelines have been developed to avoid flow-induced vibration problems at the design stage in certain areas. At the same time, new problems have come to light as a result of new generation designs and increasing demands on components, e.g., recent fretting-wear damage in nuclear fuels and steam generators, and acoustically-induced vibrations in boilers and piping systems. The 10 papers in the special section of this issue are representative of the importance of flow-induced vibrations in industrial components and reflect ongoing developments in various areas.The papers by Hassan and Hossen and Omar, et al. present numerical work on fluidelastic instability while the paper by Khalvatti et al. (from the 2007 Symposium) presents experimental work on the same subject. The paper by Hassan and Hossen contributes to ongoing efforts to model the post-fluidelastic instability tube-support interaction dynamics. In the work of Omar et al. numerically computed unsteady fluid forces in single phase flow are shown to be in excellent agreement with experimental measurements. On the same subject, Khalvatti et al. investigate experimentally the effect of tube flexibility angle relative to upstream flow.Piping vibrations and acoustics remain important areas of applied research and provided the largest number of papers at the Symposium. The papers presented here include the work of Goyder on theoretical modeling of noise generation in corrugated pipes, a paper by Eisinger and Sullivan on acoustic resonance in full size heat-exchanger tube banks, and work by Moussou et al. on the problem of instabilities of pressure relief valves. In addition, aeroacoustic sources in tandem cylinder configurations are experimentally studied by Finnegan et al.In the challenging area of two-phase flows where much work remains to be done, the paper by Cargnelutti et al. presents insightful work on pipe bends carrying internal two-phase flow including a model predicting forces induced by slug flow. Ultimately many challenges in flow-induced vibration can be traced back to fundamental fluid mechanics, thus the work of Velikorodny et al. employed digital particle image velocimetry (DPIV) to study the interaction between a turbulent shear layer and a flexible wall. The latter problem is of particular interest in paper manufacturing.While many of the papers above deal with the fluid side of the FIV problem, work by Papadakis on the stability and buckling of composite shells showed that challenging problems remain on the structural side of the problem as well.These papers give a snapshot of the numerous, challenging and interesting problems discussed at the meeting. The Symposium was made possible by the combined effort of many dedicated individuals. I wish to first thank the authors for submitting interesting and high quality work. The high quality of the final papers is in no small part a reflection of the excellence and rigor of the work done by the reviewers. I wish to thank in particular the reviewers of the papers presented in this special section.Special thanks to the Symposium co-developers, Professor D.S. Weaver, Professor T. Nakamura, Professor P. Oshkai, Professor M. Hassan, Professor G. Papadakis, Professor L. Baranyi and Dr. P. Moussou, Dr. F. Eisinger and Dr. V.P. Janzen. Finally, thanks to the Associate Editor, Professor S. Ziada and the Editor, Professor O. Widera for handling the preparation of this special section of the journal.