Tackling FSI Simulation for FIV Problems in Tube Bundle Systems With POD Approach

Tube bundles in steam boilers of nuclear power plants and nuclear on-board stokehold are known to be exposed to high levels of vibrations under flowing fluid. This coupled fluid-structure problem is still a challenge for engineers, first because of the difficulty to fully understand it, second because of the complexity for setting it up numerically. Although numerical techniques could help the understanding of such a mechanism, a complete simulation of a fluid past a whole elastically mounted tube bundle is currently out of reach for engineering purposes. To get round this problem, the use of a reduced-order model has been proposed with the introduction of the widely used Proper Orthogonal Decomposition (POD) method for a flow past a fixed structure [M. Pomare`de, E. Liberge, A. Hamdouni, E.Longatte, & J.F. Sigrist - Simulation of a fluid flow using a reduced-order modelling by POD approach applied to academic cases; PVP2010, July 18–22, Seattle]. Interesting results have been obtained for the reconstruction of the flow. Here a first step is to propose to consider the case of a flow past a fixed tube bundle configuration in order to check the good reconstruction of the flow. Then, an original approach proposed by Liberge (E. Liberge; POD-Galerking Reduction Models for Fluid-Structure Interaction Problems, PhD Thesis, Universite´ de La Rochelle, 2008) is applied to take into account the fluid-structure interaction characteristic; the so-called “multiphase” approach. This technique allows applying the POD method to a configuration of a flow past an elastically mounted structure. First results on a single circular cylinder and on a tube bundle configuration are encouraging and let us hope that parametric studies or prediction calculations could be set up with such an approach in a future work.