Performance of a TMD to mitigate wind-induced interference effects between two industrial chimneys

Abstract

The present paper studies the performance of a tuned mass damper (TMD) installed in a 183 m tall chimney located at the edge of the wake shed by another chimney. Numerical and experimental results are available. For the simulations, wind action is considered by solving several 2D flow problems on a selected number of horizontal planes, in the transverse direction to the stacks. On such planes, Navier-Stokes equations are solved to estimate the fluid action at different positions of the chimneys and standard interpolation techniques are applied in the vertical direction. An Arbitrary Lagrangian-Eulerian (ALE) approach is used to consider the moving domain, and a fractional-step scheme is used to solve the fluid field. For the structural modelling, chimneys are meshed using 3D beam finite elements. The time integration procedure used for the structural dynamics is based on the standard second order Bossak method. For each period of time, the fluid problem is solved, the aeroelastic analysis is carried out and the geometry of the fluid mesh of each plane is updated according to the structural movements. With this procedure and model updating techniques, the response of the leeward chimney is evaluated for different scenarios, revealing an interesting dependence of the TMD performance on the wind speed and direction.