Hi,

Does anyone know how to model a free vibrating cylinder (just a 2-D circular cross-section)in FLUENT, i.e. the cylinder is fixed in the horizontal direction, but can move freely in the vertical direction?

Any ideas? Any little help will really be appreciated.

Thanks really much

The only way to do this is to use a combination of dynamic mesh + UDF. This UDF should be a 1DOF solver, i.e. to calculate the vertical force acting on the cylinder surface at the given time step and consequently to instruct FLUENT how much and which way to move the cylinder to. It should not be very difficult to write.

Of course, the model should be unsteady, and the best dynamic mesh method I can imagine would be a layering above and under a moving mesh block constructed around the cylinder, with interfaces in front and after it (a fully structured mesh).

I think that should do it, although I never tried it personally.

All the best,

Razvan