Parametric Study and Scaling of Axial-Flow-Induced Cylinder Vibration

This work aims to conduct a parametric study on the flow induced vibration of an isolated elastic cylinder in axial flow. The cylinder with both ends fixed is free to vibrate in the lateral directions. Large eddy simulation and a two-way coupling CFD-CSM scheme are used to capture the turbulent flow and fluid–structure interaction, respectively. It has been found that the root-mean-square vibration amplitude Arms* of the cylinder exhibits a considerable dependence on a number of parameters, including dimensionless flow velocity \(\overline{U}\) (= 0.65–6.98), turbulence intensity Tu (= 0.7–6.0%), integral length scale Lw* (= 0.2–1.28) of the incident flow and cylinder length-to-diameter ratio L* (= 20–43). It has been found from empirical scaling analysis that Arms* = f1( \(\overline{U}\) , Tu, Lw*, L*) may be reduced to Arms/L = f2( \(\overline{U}_{eff}\) ), where f1 and f2 are different functions and the scaling factor \(\overline{U}_{eff}\) is interpreted as the effective Reynolds number. Several interesting inferences can be obtained from the scaling law.