Drag amplification and fatigue damage in vortex-induced vibrations

Fatigue damage and drag force amplification due to Vortex-Induced-Vibrations (VIV) continue to cause significant problems in the design of structures which operate in ocean current environments. These problems are magnified by the uncertainty in VIV prediction, particularly with regard to fatigue damage. Although the last fifteen years has seen significant advancement in VIV prediction, important fatigue and drag related questions remain unanswered. This research addresses two important problems. The first is the difficulty in measuring local drag coefficients on long flexible cylinders, excited by VIV. At best engineers are forced to use spatially averaged drag coefficients. This is especially inaccurate when the pipe and flow properties change, either due to partial coverage with VIV mitigation devices, such as strakes or fairings, or shear in the incident current profile. The second problem is the lack of design procedures that account for the effect on fatigue damage due to the higher harmonics in the VIV strain response. To address these problems, two experiments were performed to collect data, the first in October of 2004 and the second in October of 2006. Both of these experiments were designed specifically to collect strain measurements from a densely instrumented pipe undergoing VIV at high mode numbers when subjected to current profiles with varying amounts of shear. Data from these experiments was used to develop a method to extract local drag forces from the measured mean strain. This method, when applied to a partially faired pipe undergoing VIV, successfully and accurately distinguished the dissimilar local drag coefficient between the bare pipe region and the region with fairings. In bare pipes, for the first time the method allowed for the measurement of the variation of local drag coefficient along the length of a flexible pipe undergoing VIV in sheared current.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Mechanical Engineering.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2008

Author dc:creator

• Jhingran, Vikas Gopal

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• J. Kim Vandiver.

• Mechanical Engineering.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/44804

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/44804