Normal modes of oscillation for rotating stars. III - Variational calculations with an improved set of basis vectors

1986 ◽  
Vol 301 ◽  
pp. 185 ◽  
Author(s):  
M. J. Clement
Author(s):  
S. I. McNeill ◽  
P. Agarwal

Vortex-Induced-Vibrations (VIV) due to ocean currents can consume a sizable portion of the allotted fatigue life of marine risers. Vibration monitoring and concurrent estimation of fatigue damage due to VIV can significantly enhance the safe and reliable operation of risers. To this end, riser response can be characterized by using sensors (e.g. accelerometers and/or angular rate sensors) to measure the motion of the riser at a few locations. Fatigue damage can be predicted along the entire length of riser from measured data using the method of modal decomposition and reconstruction. In this method the structural response of interest, such as stress and fatigue damage, is expressed by modal superposition, where the modal weights are estimated using measured data and analytical modeshapes. However the accuracy of this method declines as the sensor density (number of sensors per unit riser length) decreases, especially when the riser vibrates in high-order modes and exhibits traveling wave behavior. In this paper, an efficient frequency-domain methodology allowing for accurate reconstruction of the riser response along the entire riser using a limited number of sensors is proposed. We first identify the excited VIV modes (natural frequency and modeshape) using principal vectors of the cross spectral density. Modal decomposition and reconstruction is performed separately for each VIV band surrounding each excited mode. This allows us to use several (as many as the number of sensors) participating modes in each band, and thus improve the accuracy. Since the stress distribution is sensitive to the chosen set of participating modes, we optimize over several candidate sets, selecting the set of modes that result in the lowest prediction error. In order to improve the reconstruction of complex modes, particularly traveling waves, the modeshapes can be augmented with additional basis vectors. The additional basis vectors are obtained by shifting the phase of the normal modes by 90 degrees at every wave number using the Hilbert transform. Though developed in the context of VIV, the method can be used to estimate fatigue damage due to vibrations regardless of the excitation mechanism. The methodology is demonstrated using the NDP (Norwegian Deepwater Program) test data on a 38 meter long slender riser, using data from eight accelerometers. Results show that the proposed algorithm can reconstruct stresses and fatigue damage accurately along the length of the riser in the presence of traveling wave behavior using relatively few sensors.


Within the last decade, significant progress has been made in modelling rotating stars in general relativity and in relating observable properties to the equation of state of matter at high density. A formalism describing rotating perfect fluids is presented and numerical models of neutron stars are briefly discussed, with emphasis on upper limits on mass and rotation. The equations governing small oscillations are reviewed, and a variational principle appropriate both to eulerian and lagrangian perturbations is obtained. This extends to relativity an eulerian principle used to find non-axisymmetric stability points for perfect fluids. A related eulerian approach has been recently used to obtain normal modes of rotating newtonian stars. The review concludes with an outline of this work and of the two types of instability that can restrict the range of neutron stars. In particular, current work shows that several kinds of effective viscosity limit the possible role of a non-axisymmetric instability driven by gravitational waves.


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