Coupled vibration of a partially fluid-filled cylindrical container with a cylindrical internal body

In the present paper a method is proposed to investigate the effects of a rigid internal body on the coupled vibration of a partially fluid-filled cylindrical container. The internal body is a thin-walled and open-ended cylindrical shell. The internal body is concentrically and partially submerged inside a container. The radial and axial distances between the internal body and the container are filled with fluid. Along the contact surface between the container and the fluid, the compatibility requirement for the fluid-structure interactions is applied and the Rayleigh-Ritz method is used to calculate the natural frequencies and modes of a partially fluid-filled cylindrical container. The fluid domain is continuous, simply connected, and non-convex. The fluid is assumed to be incompressible and inviscid. The velocity potential for fluid motion is formulated in terms of eigenfunction expansions for two distinct fluid regions. The resulting equations are solved by using the Galerkin method. The results from the proposed method are in good agreement with experimental and numerical solutions available in the literature for the partially water-filled cylindrical container without internal body. A finite element analysis is also used to check the validity of the present method for the partially water-filled cylindrical container with internal body. The effects of the fluid level, internal body radius, and internal body length on the natural frequencies of the coupled system are also investigated. (C) 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.