Numerical Simulation of Flow Control on Marine Riser With Attached Splitter Plate

Attaching a splitter plate (SP) on the base of a riser wall is used to control the flow of risers and evaluated by using the CFD technique in this paper. A finite-volume total variation diminishing (TVD) approach for solving incompressible turbulent flow with renormalization group (RNG) turbulence model was used to simulate the hydrodynamic characteristics of the riser system with additional SP for the different aspect ratio of length to diameter L/D. It was shown that the present numerical method has high order of accuracy by comparing with the available experimental and numerical simulation data for typical circular cylinder flow. A riser system attached with SPs of L/D = 0.5∼2.0 for Reynolds number 1000, and 30000 respectively can obviously reduce the lift and drag coefficient and alter the vortex shedding frequency. The mean drag coefficient can be reduced up to 20% and 35% and the maximum lift coefficient can be reduced up to 94% and 97%, for Re = 1000 and 30000, respectively. The lift can be effectively suppressed after a relative long time. L/D = 0.5∼1.0 may be considered as more practical geometries considering the real conditions, which also have good flow control effect.