Frequency lock-in during vortex induced vibration of a rotating blade

The vortex-induced vibration (VIV) of a rotating blade is studied in this paper. Uniform Euler-Bernoulli cantilever beam equation is used to model the rotating blade, while the nonlinear oscillator satisfying Van der Pol equation is used to represent the vortex shedding. The fluctuating lift force on the blade due to the wake dynamics is expressed such that it is proportional to the square of the magnitude of the relative velocity at which the blade interacts with the fluid. An unsteady lift due to vortex shedding acts on the blade, where as the blade is coupled with the fluid through a linear inertial coupling, resulting in a fluid-structure interaction problem. The coupled equations are discretized by using modal functions which satisfy the Eigenvalue problem. The work attempts to understand the interaction between the blade modes and the wake modes. The influence of the mass ratio and the reduced flow velocity on the coupling of the modes is explored. It is concluded form the study that the first mode is dominant and the effect of higher modes is less significant. Therefore, the single mode approximation is considered to study the instabilities associated with the frequency lock-in phenomenon of a rotating blade. The influence of fluid and blade damping, mass ratio and the coupling parameter on the lock-in phenomenon is investigated in this study.