HAM Solutions for Vortex-Induced Vibration of a Circular Cylinder

The vortex-induced vibration (VIV) phenomenon is result of fluid-structure interaction which occurs in many engineering fields. The study of VIV of a circular cylinder is of practical importance (such as in marine cables and flexible risers in petroleum production). In this paper, one classical phenomenological VIV model — the motion of the cylinder is modeled by a simple linear equation, and the fluctuating nature of the vortex wake oscillation is modeled by a van der Pol oscillator, is analyzed. Firstly, the homotopy analysis method (HAM), a powerful technique for highly nonlinear problems, is developed to solve the coupled fluid-structure dynamical system with the convergence of the homotopy series solutions being demonstrated. Based on the HAM solutions, some properties of the fully nonlinear classical coupled VIV model are presented. All the results proved that the proposed HAM scheme has potential to be an effective analytic technique to study the VIV problems.