Effect of internal bubbly flow on pipe vibrations

This paper presents an experimental investigation on wall vibrations of a pipe due to injection of a uniform bubble cloud into the pipe flow. For different bubble void fractions and averaged bubble sizes, the vibrations were measured using accelerometers. To understand the underlying physics, the evolution of the vibration spectra along the streamwise direction was examined. Results showed that wall vibrations were greatly enhanced up to 25 dB, compared with no bubble case. The characteristics of the vibration were mainly dependent on void fraction. These vibrations were believed to be caused by two mechanisms: acoustic resonance and normal modes of the bubble cloud. The former, originating from the interaction between the first mode of the bubble cloud and the first acoustic mode of the pipe, persisted along the entire pipe to enhance the vibration over a broad band frequency range, while the later, due to the process of bubble formation, successively decayed in the streamwise direction.