Vortex-Induced Vibration: Universal Phenomena in Diverse Systems

The long-term goals of the research under this award have been to discover and understand generic phenomena in a whole class of vortex-induced vibration systems. We discover, using novel controlled damping, that the immense scatter in the classical Griffin plot peak amplitude versus mass-damping over 3 decades, can now be collapsed beautifully if one renormalises the axes, taking into account the effect of Reynolds number, which was previously not considered. We find, from controlled vibration of a cylinder, using extremely high-resolution variation of parameters, that, for the first time, accurate prediction of vortex-induced vibration is possible by searching for stable solutions with positive excitation. We discover that rising bodies do not vibrate unless their mass falls below a special value, which coincides with critical mass found in VIV studies of elastically mounted bodies. Similar response branches are found for a wide set of VlV systems, and in all studies we find the existence of a critical mass. Our work has formed the basis of a number of comprehensive papers in Journal of Fluid Mechanics and other journals, and has led to an invited review of VlV in Annual Review of Fluid Mechanics 2004. The P.1. has founded and chained a series of international conferences on Bluff Body Wakes and Vortex-Induced Vibrations USA in 1998, France in 2000, Australia in 2002, Greece in 2005, Brazil in 2007.