Motivation
They occur in many engineering situations, such as bridges, stacks, transmission lines, aircraft control surfaces, offshore structures, thermowells, engines, heat exchangers, marine cables, towed cables, drilling and production risers in petroleum production, mooring cables, moored structures, tethered structures, buoyancy and spar hulls, pipelines, cable-laying, members of jacketed structures, and other hydrodynamic and hydroacoustic applications. The most recent interest in long cylindrical members in water ensues from the development of hydrocarbon resources in depths of 1000 m or more.
Vortex-induced vibration (VIV) is an important source of fatigue damage of offshore oil exploration and production risers. These slender structures experience both current flow and top-end vessel motions, which give rise to the flow-structure relative motion and cause VIV. The top-end vessel motion causes the riser to oscillate and the corresponding flow profile appears unsteady.
One of the classical open-flow problems in fluid mechanics concerns the flow around a circular cylinder, or more generally, a bluff body. At very low Reynolds numbers (based on the diameter of the circular member) the streamlines of the resulting flow is perfectly symmetric as expected from potential theory. However as the Reynolds number is increased the flow becomes asymmetric and the so called Kármán vortex street occurs.
The Strouhal number relates the frequency of shedding to the velocity of the flow and a characteristic dimension of the body (diameter in the case of a cylinder). It is defined as and is named after Čeněk (Vincent) Strouhal (a Czech scientist). In the equation fst is the vortex shedding frequency (or the Strouhal frequency) of a body at rest, D is the diameter of the circular cylinder, and U is the velocity of the ambient flow. The Strouhal number for a cylinder is 0.2 over a wide range of flow velocities. The phenomenon of lock-in happens when the vortex shedding frequency becomes close to a natural frequency of vibration of the structure. When this happens large and damaging vibrations can result.
Read more about this topic: Vortex-induced Vibration
Famous quotes containing the word motivation:
“Self-determination has to mean that the leader is your individual gut, and heart, and mind or we’re talking about power, again, and its rather well-known impurities. Who is really going to care whether you live or die and who is going to know the most intimate motivation for your laughter and your tears is the only person to be trusted to speak for you and to decide what you will or will not do.”
—June Jordan (b. 1939)