State-of-the-art in plant component flow-induced vibration (FIV)

Abstract

Flow-induced vibration (FIV) continues to be a critical phenomenon for plant safety. Notably, the understanding of FIV generated by multiphase flow is still immature, and various accidents and troubles have been reported for the plant components including a steam generator, natural gas lines, piping systems, and so on. It is because FIV is complicated to be predicted during the plant's design stage, and usually is first noticed in the operation stage. Hence, a practical solution for new types of FIV has been through post-processing by conducting the laboratory-scale experiment to simulate the prototype. Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) has become a powerful tool to assess FIV, but the approach is still under development for multiphase flow case. It is partly due to the lack of experimental data, incomplete interfacial transfer terms included in the two-fluid model, as well as the difficulty to couple two-phase flow dynamics and structural dynamics in the simulation stage. Additionally, inadequate FIV database for the simulation benchmark also needs to be resolved for the advancement of CFD and finite-element-method (FEM) models. The present review summarizes fundamentals of FIV caused by gas-liquid two-phase flow, and recent FIV research activities ranging from experiment to simulation.