Computational fluid mechanics and vortex induced vibrations

Vortex Induced Vibration (VIV) plays a very important role in the offshore petroleum exploration. Risers used in oil extraction from the sea bed to the offshore platforms are subjected to marine flows that may trigger dangerous VIV oscillations. Many researches have been spending a lot of efforts to understand the complicated flow around bluff bodies to control or even eliminate the VIV occurrence. Numerical simulations have been unsuccessful to predict the VIV amplitudes mainly because of the diffusive nature of the numerical schemes. This work presents a successful methodology to simulate numerically the vortex induced vibration on an elastically mounted circular cylinder capable of reproducing correct response amplitudes of the VIV oscillations. The Roe-Sweby scheme is used to solve the slightly compressible RANS equations written in general curvilinear coordinates and the k-epsilon turbulence model is used to simulate the turbulent flow in the wake of a circular cylinder. Some fundamental concepts are presented through this work necessary to understand the application of the methodology to the governing equations. The numerical results obtained using this methodology agree remarkably well with experimental data obtained from the literature.