Predicting turbulence-induced vibration in axial annular flow by means of large-eddy simulations

• Wall-resolved Large-Eddy Simulations of annular fluid flow.
• Comparison of pressure and force density spectrum with empirical Corcos and Chase model.
• The pressure spectrum due to turbulence does not follow the multiplication hypothesis.
• Accurate prediction of turbulence-induced vibration without empirical data.

Turbulence-induced vibration is typically considered as a type of vibration with one-way coupling between the fluid flow and the structural motion: the turbulence creates an incident force field on the structure, but the structural displacement does not influence the turbulence. It is however challenging to measure the turbulence forcing function experimentally. In this article, the forcing function in annular flow is computed by means of Large-eddy simulations. The pressure spectrum is applied to the inner cylinder and the resulting vibration is computed. It is shown that the commonly used multiplication hypothesis does not hold for the present results. The computed spectrum showed an upper limit to the coherence length. The results of these computations are compared to experimental results available in literature and to semi-empirical models. The predicted displacements compared well with experimental results.