Copyright © 2011 Philippe Mainçon. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

Slender structures immersed in a cross flow can experience vibrations induced by vortex shedding (VIV), which cause fatigue damage and other problems. VIV models that are used in structural design today tend to assume harmonic oscillations in some way or other. A time domain model would allow to capture the chaotic nature of VIV and to model interactions with other loads and nonlinearities. Such a model was developed in the present work: for each cross section, recent velocity history is compressed using Laguerre polynomials. The compressed information is used to enter an interpolation function to predict the instantaneous force, allowing to step the dynamic analysis. An offshore riser was modeled in this way: some analyses provided an unusually fine level of realism, while in other analyses, the riser fell into an unphysical pattern of vibration. It is concluded that the concept is promising, yet that more work is needed to understand orbit stability and related issues, in order to produce an engineering tool.