Session: FSI-02-01 The David S. Weaver Memorial Session on Flow Induced Vibration: Tube Arrays

Paper Number: 122923

122923 - The Impact of Tube Array Compactness on the Generation of Acoustic Resonance 

Industrial applications, such as tube bundle heat exchangers, suffer from excessive vibration and severe noise due to flow-excited acoustic resonance, potentially leading to severe equipment damage. Two conditions are necessary to initiate flow-excite acoustic resonance. The first condition is the coincidence between the frequency of the periodic flow structures formed around the bluff body and one of the natural acoustic frequencies of the enclosure. The second condition is that sufficient energy must be available to overcome the acoustic damping capacity of the system to incur and initiate resonance excitation. Acoustic resonance excitation will not be possible if the frequency coincidence condition is not met or the excitation energy is insufficient. Several studies have attempted to assess heat exchangers' susceptibility to excite acoustic resonance by proposing different acoustic damping criteria. In most of the criteria selected, researchers were unable to distinguish between acoustic resonant and non-resonance cases, especially when applied to large-scale heat exchangers. There is an agreement in these studies that the acoustic tones generated by flow over a bank of cylinders in ducts can be a function of the following non-dimensional parameters: tube-to-tube pitch-to-diameter L/D ratio, tube arrangement, number of tube rows, reduced velocity, and Mach number. However, little attention has been given to the influence of the tube arrays' compactness (height-to-width ratio) on the flow-sound interaction mechanism. Therefore, this investigation aims to study the effect of the tube array's compactness (height-to-width ratio) on the flow sound interaction mechanism of the inline tube array arrangement. The spacing ratio between the tubes is maintained at L/D = 2, and the tube diameter remains fixed at 0.5 inches. Different numbers of tube rows and numbers of tubes per row are considered in this work. A summary of the results is presented in this paper.

Presenting Author: Rasha Noufal ontario tech University

Presenting Author Biography: Rasha Noufal is a Ph.D. student in the Mechanical Engineering department at Ontario Tech University.

Authors:

Rasha Noufal ontario tech University
Hossam Kishawy Ontario Tech University
Atef Mohany Ontario Tech University