Study on suppressing the vortex-induced vibration of flexible riser in frequency domain

Abstract

Vortex-induced vibration (VIV) may cause severe fatigue damage on deep-sea flexible risers. In many researches on active control of VIV, numerical simulation is widely used because of its suitability for parametric studies and lower cost compared to experiments. However, the existing numerical simulations rarely consider the change of lift during the active control of VIV due to the complexity of the control method. Moreover, the calculation time of numerical simulation is relatively long in the time domain. To solve these problems, the active control proposed in this paper is carried out in the frequency domain. A boundary control method considering the change of lift force is proposed through an active control bending moment is applied to the top of riser. Compared with the experimental and numerical results of the flexible riser model under shear flow, the effectiveness of the proposed method is verified. In addition, the effects of different shear currents and different controlled bending moments on structural fatigue damage are studied. The results demonstrated that the reduction of fatigue damage is smaller when the control bending moment is small. As the control bending moment increases, the reduction of fatigue damage increases. However, when the control bending moment exceeds the critical value, the fatigue damage no longer decreases. From the total power perspective, the control energy and the proportion of energy in the system increase with the growth of the control moment. It is difficult to directly obtain the optimal control bending moment although there is an optimal control bending moment. Trial calculations are used to obtain the optimal control bending moment in this paper. The greater the shear currents, the greater the required control bending moment.