Three-dimensional computation for flow-induced vibrations of an upstream circular cylinder in two tandem circular cylinders

It is well known from a lot of experimental data that fluid forces acting on two tandem circular cylinders are quite different from those acting on a single circular cylinder. Therefore, we first present numerical results for fluid forces acting on two tandem circular cylinders, which are mounted at various spacings in a smooth flow, and second we present numerical results for flow-induced vibrations of the upstream circular cylinder in the tandem arrangement. The two circular cylinders are arranged at close spacing in a flow field. The upstream circular cylinder is elastically placed by damper-spring systems and moves in both the in-line and cross-flow directions. In such models, each circular cylinder is assumed as a rigid body. On the other hand, we do not introduce a turbulent model such as the Large Eddy Simulation (LES) or Reynolds Averaged Navier-Stokes (RANS) models into the numerical scheme to compute the fluid flow. Our numerical procedure to capture the flow-induced vibration phenomena of the upstream circular cylinder is treated as a fluid-structure interaction problem in which the ideas of weak coupling is taken into consideration.