Aerospace engineering tool predicts equipment failures from fluid movement
Engineers can now detect dangerous vibrations in pipes, fans, and other fluid-carrying systems months before failure occurs—using methods borrowed from aircraft design. The early-warning approach could slash unexpected downtime and maintenance costs across manufacturing, energy, and aerospace industries.
Originaltitel: Efficient Fluid Structure Interaction Analysis in the Conceptual Design Phase: Industrially Proven and Validated Unique Methodology based on Aerospace Concepts
<p>Aircraft flutter failure, vibration induce fan explosions, and vibration induced failure of tubes, pipes, and hoses subjected to internal and/or external axial flow showing fatigue type failure. These are all examples of aeroelastic or more generally fluid-elastic stability and response problems with the systems. The aim with this thesis is to illustrate the possibilities that opens when a frequency domain approach to the solution of fluid-elastic problems is utilized. A methodology of this type was developed in the first phase of the research leading to this thesis. The basic methods for aircraft aeroelastic analysis started to appear a few years before the second world war, and was further developed during the post second world war era. In this research the methodology used in the aeronautical community has been generalized, such that the early type of thinking can be used when studying more or less any type of system (in which the interaction between fluids and structures has a significant influence on it’s dynamic characteristics).</p><p>This thesis presents the study of these type of phenomena for several applications. The presented applications range from investigations of the cause of failure of ventilation fans to the study of the dynamics of high pressure hydraulic hoses. In all case, results are presented from studies where the analysis is either compared with experimental behavior, or where the results are used as guidance for design changes followed by tests of the updated design showing dramatic improvement of the dynamic behavior. The purpose of presenting the application case studies is to give the reader an insight into how the tools can be used and the type of phenomena that appear for these fluid-elastic systems. It is clearly illustrated that fluid-elastic systems need to be analyzed through the entire function envelop of the system and not only at specific conditions. The reason for this is that unwanted instability conditions may appear anywhere in the envelop. To be able to scan the envelop much more efficient tools are needed than the ones provided through coupling of ALE-CFD and FEM software. By reading this thesis, the analyst gets an eye opener and a first step into an interesting field of engineering that is fairly unexplored outside the aeronautical community.</p>