Study on the flow-induced vibration of a two-tandem cylinder system in rigid body motion

Abstract

The flow-induced vibration (FIV) of a cylinder cluster is often observed in subsea pipelines and marine risers. The motion of the cylinder clusters was often modeled as the equation of motion of a particle, which has ignored the torsion freedom. Hence, the answers to the following questions are still unavailable—what are the impacts of torsion on the FIV of a cylinder cluster? Does torsional freedom facilitate the development of new features in FIV? In the present work, the FIV of a two-tandem cylinder system was numerically studied under the consideration of torsional freedom. It was found that six well-defined regimes were formed in the FIV of the cylinder system with the increase in the reduced velocity. The formation of different regimes mainly occurred by the accouplement of two frequencies—the vortex shedding frequency and the natural frequency of the cylinder system. A quirky low frequency dominated the cross-flow vibration at some reduced velocities, significantly magnifying the cross-flow vibration and the torsional vibration. The two cylinders acted as two feet treading water alternatively, enabling the cylinder system to move further on one side at such low frequencies. The characteristics of the amplitudes and frequency responses vs Ur* were qualitatively similar when the stiffness ratio k* was in the range of 10 ≤ k* ≤ 50, where Ur* was the torsional reduced velocity which was defined by the uniform velocity U divided torsional natural frequency frn and diameter of the cylinder D.