Experimental investigation on flow-induced vibration excitation in an elastically mounted circular cylinder in cylinder arrays

An experimental investigation was performed in a low-speed wind tunnel in which an elastically mounted circular cylinder was fitted with two accelerometers and surrounded by from one to six identical cylinders in order to study the fluid flow characteristics and predict the possibility of suppressing flow-induced vibration excitation in the test cylinder. The spectral diagram, amplitude and orbital motion of the test cylinder were used to analyze the vibration excitation under differing free stream velocities, natural frequencies of the test cylinder, and number of surrounding cylinders. In this study, for the test cylinder with the same natural frequency as the adjacent cylinders (24 Hz) the amplitude response showed that when the fluid flow velocity exceeded a critical value, which depends on the arrangement of the cylinders, fluid elastic instability occurred. Beyond the critical velocity the cylinder became excited and vibrated in a figure-of-eight pattern along with the line-dominated spectrum, which implies that by having the same frequency along with a phase shift, the characteristic behavior of the cylinder is observed to be like an oscillator with the cross-wise and stream-wise response. From the assessment of the amplitude response of the test cylinder it was observed that the upstream cylinders had a greater influence on the amplitude response than the downstream cylinders. On the other hand, when the test cylinder had a natural frequency different to the adjacent cylinders it was observed that the frequency had a minimal effect on the critical velocity, and yet beyond the critical velocity it had a significant influence on the vibration amplitude response. (paper)