Development of Design Criteria for Fluid Induced Structural Vibration in Steam Generators and Heat Exchangers

OAK-B135 Flow-induced vibration in heat exchangers has been a major cause of concern in the nuclear industry for several decades. Many incidents of failure of heat exchangers due to apparent flow-induced vibration have been reported through the USNRC incident reporting system. Almost all heat exchangers have to deal with this problem during their operation. The phenomenon has been studied since the 1970s and the database of experimental studies on flow-induced vibration is constantly updated with new findings and improved design criteria for heat exchangers. In the nuclear industry, steam generators are often affected by this problem. However, flow-induced vibration is not limited to nuclear power plants, but to any type of heat exchanger used in many industrial applications such as chemical processing, refrigeration and air conditioning. Specifically, shell and tube type heat exchangers experience flow-induced vibration due to the high velocity flow over the tube banks. Flow-induced vibration in these heat exchangers leads to equipment breakdown and hence expensive repair and process shutdown. The goal of this research is to provide accurate measurements that can help modelers to validate their models using the measured experimental parameters and thereby develop better design criteria for avoiding fluid-elastic instability in heat exchangers. The research is divided between two primary experimental efforts, the first conducted using water alone (single phase) and the second using a mixture of air or steam and water as the working fluid (two phase). The outline of this report is as follows: After the introduction to fluid-elastic instability, the experimental apparatus constructed to conduct the experiments is described in Chapter 2 along with the measurement procedures. Chapter 3 presents results obtained on the tube array and the flow loop, as well as techniques used in data processing. The project performance is described and evaluated in Chapter 4 followed by a discussion of publications and presentations relevant to the project in Chapter 5, while the conclusions and recommendations for future work are presented in Chapter 6