Flow characteristics around a circular cylinder subjected to vortex-induced vibration near a plane boundary

Although vortex-induced vibration (VIV) has been extensively studied, much of existing literature deals with uniform flow in the absence of a boundary. The VIV flow field of a structure close to a boundary generally remains unexplored, but it can have important engineering implications, such as pipeline scour if the boundary is an erodible seabed. In this paper, laboratory experiments are performed to investigate the flow characteristics of an elastically mounted circular cylinder undergoing VIV, and a rigid plane boundary is considered to simplify the problem. The initial gap-to-diameter ratio is fixed at 0.8, and six different reduced velocities are considered. The velocity field is measured using a high resolution particle image velocimetry (PIV) system, which has several advantages over traditional PIV systems, including high sampling rate and the ability to mitigate scatter of laser light near the boundary, allowing accurate measurements at the viscous sublayer. This paper presents the vibration amplitude and oscillation frequency for different Vr; in addition, the mean velocity field, turbulence characteristics, vortex behavior, gap flow velocity, and normal/shear stresses on the boundary were measured/calculated, leading to new insights on the flow field behavior.