Unsteady pressure in the annular flow between two concentric cylinders, one of which is oscillating: Experiment and theory

The first objective of this paper is to present a series of accurate experimental measurements of the unsteady pressure in the annulus between two concentric cylinders, the outer one of which executes a harmonic planar motion, either transverse translational or rocking motion about a hinge, with and without annular flow. The second objective is the solution of the unsteady Navier–Stokes and continuity equations for the same annular geometry under the same boundary conditions for an incompressible fluid in the laminar regime. The solutions are obtained with a three-time-level implicit integration method in a fixed computational domain by assuming small amplitudes of oscillation of the outer cylinder. A pseudo-time integration method with artificial compressibility is used to advance the solution between consecutive real time levels. The finite difference method is used for spatial discretization on a stretched staggered grid. The problem is reduced to a scalar tridiagonal system, solved by a decoupling procedure which is based on a factored Alternating Direction Implicit (ADI) scheme with lagged nonlinearities. The third objective is the comparison of the experimental results with the theoretical ones. This comparison shows that the two are in good agreement in the case of translational motion, and in excellent agreement in the case of rocking motion. The experimental and theoretical work presented in this paper is useful for fluid–structure interaction and flow-induced vibration analyses in such geometries.