Fluid Added-Mass Effect on Flexural Vibration of Hemispherical Shell Structure

In this hydroelasticity study, the fluid added-mass effect on a hemispherical shell structure under flexural vibration is investigated. The vibration response of the hemisphere is solved by using a commercial finite element software (ABAQUS) coupled with an in-house boundary element code that models the fluid as potential flow. The fluid-structure interaction is solved as a fully-coupled system by modal superposition to reduce the number of degrees of freedom. The need for an iterative scheme to pass displacement/force information between the two solvers is avoided by direct coupling between the fluid and structure equations. The numerical results on the downward shift in natural frequencies due to added-mass effect compare well with vibration measurements conducted on a stainless-steel bowl with interior and exterior fluid. For water and soap-water solution used in the experiments, the fluid viscosity (varying over a wide range) did not have any significant effect on the wet natural frequencies. This is due to the small viscous boundary layer (milimetre scale) compared to the nominal size of the bowl in centimetres. For such cases, the fluid-added mass only depends on the density of the fluid and the use of potential flow in the numerical model is applicable.