Validation of turbulence induced vibration design guidelines in a normal triangular tube bundle during two-phase crossflow

Abstract

The present paper addresses an experimental investigation on flow-induced vibration for air–water flow across a normal triangular tube bundle, with transverse pitch-to-diameter ratio of 1.26, aiming to validate the design guidelines found in the open literature for turbulence-induced vibration. In order to do so, the present experimental approach features a tube mounted in cantilever, instrumented with two accelerometers, perpendicularly aligned, mounted in the free tip. This configuration allows to measure the tube acceleration response under distinct operation conditions. The dynamic parameters necessary to evaluate the design guidelines are extracted from these data. Assuming that turbulence-induced is the dominant vibration mechanism for the range of experimental conditions covered by the present study, the current models used to predict the tube vibration upper bound are reviewed and implemented. The present results are plotted with these envelopes showing good agreement, hence, validating the test bench for future works. Moreover, it is noticed that the loading patterns are strongly dependent on the experimental conditions, specially the local flow pattern. Additionally, a predictive method for tube displacement amplitude is proposed based on the experimental results obtained in the present study.