Fluid-structure interaction (FSI) of flow past elastically supported rigid structures

Abstract

Fluid-structure interaction (FSI) is an important physical phenomenon in many applications and across various disciplines including aerospace, civil and bio-engineering. In civil engineering, applications include the design of wind turbines, pipelines, suspension bridges and offshore platforms. Ocean structures such as drilling risers, mooring lines, cables, undersea piping and tension-leg platforms can be subject to strong ocean currents, and such structures may suffer from Vortex-Induced Vibrations (VIV's), where vortex shedding of the flow interacts with the structural properties, leading to large amplitude vibrations in both in-line and cross-flow directions. Over the past years, many experimental and numerical studies have been conducted to comprehend the underlying physical mechanisms. However, to date there is still limited understanding of the effect of oscillatory interactions between fluid flow and structural behavior though such interactions can cause large deformations. This research proposes a mathematical framework to accurately predict FSI for elastically supported rigid structures. The numerical method developed solves the Navier-Stokes (NS) equations for the fluid and the Equation of Motion (EOM) for the structure. The proposed method employs Finite Differences (FD) on Cartesian grids together with an improved, efficient and oscillation-free Immersed Boundary Method (IBM), the accuracy of which is verified for several test cases of increasing complexity. A variety of two and three dimensional FSI simulations are performed to demonstrate the accuracy and applicability of the method. In particular, forced and a free vibration of a rigid cylinder including Vortex-Induced Vibration (VIV) of an elastically supported cylinder are presented and compared with reference simulations and experiments. Then, the interference between two cylinders in tandem arrangement at two different spacing is investigated. In terms of VIV, three different scenarios were studied for each cylinder arrangement to compare resonance regime to a single cylinder. Finally, the IBM is implemented into a three-dimensional Large-Eddy Simulation (LES) method and two high Reynolds number (Re) flows are studied for a stationary and transversely oscillating cylinder. The robustness, accuracy and applicability of the method for high Re number flow is demonstrated by comparing the turbulence statistics of the two cases and discussing differences in the mean and instantaneous flows.