Experimental and numerical fluid-structure interaction analysis of a suspended rod subjected to forced vibrations

Abstract: This study is evaluating Solid-Acoustic Finite Element modelling as a method for calculating structural vibration response in water. When designing for example vehicles, it is important to avoid vibrational resonance in any part of the structure, as this causes additional noise and reduced lifespan. It is known that vibration response can be affected by the surrounding medium, i.e. water for marine applications.Previous studies show that this effect is both material and geometry dependant why it is hard to apply standardised design rules. An alternative approach is direct calculation using full Fluid Structure Interaction (FSI) by Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) and Finite Element Methods (FEM) which is a powerful but slow and computationally costly method.Therefore, there exists a need for a faster and more efficient calculation method to predict how structures subjected to dynamic loads will respond when submerged in water. By modelling water as an acoustic medium, viscous effects are neglected and calculation time can be drastically reduced. Such an approximation is a linearization of the problem and can be suitable when all deformations are assumed to be small and there are no other nonlinear effects present.This study consists of experimental tests where vibrational response was measured for rod shaped test specimens which were suspended in a water filled test rig and excited using an electrodynamic shaker. A Solid-Acoustic Finite Element model of the same experiment was created, and the test and simulation results were compared. The numerical results were shown to agree well with experiments up to 450 Hz. Above 450 Hz differences occur which is probably due to a simplified rig geometry in the numerical model.