A Study on the Vortex Induced Vibration of a Cylindrical Structure with Surface Bulges

Abstract

Inspired by the cactus in nature, a cactus-like cross-sectional structure was proposed to achieve the VIV suppression. The VIV of the elastically mounted cylinder was realized based on the ANSYS Fluent and User Defined Function (UDF). The dynamic motion of the cylinder was solved by the single-step time integration algorithms Newmark-β method. The in-house code was first validated by studying the 2DOF VIV of a circular cylinder with small mass ratio over the range U*=2~13, and the results agree well with the published literature. Then, the performance of surface bulge on VIV suppression was studied and four different coverage ratios (CR) were considered, i.e., 0%, 20%, 33%, and 40%. The VIV of a bulged cylinder can be effectively suppressed. CR20 performs the best in VIV suppression and the suppression efficiency in streamwise and transverse direction are 44.6% and 63.1%, respectively. The mechanism of surface bulge on the VIV suppression is the shift of separation point of the shear layer and vortices form between the surface bulges.