The importance of interaction between structure and moving fluid, which can cause potential destructive forces on the structure, was clearly observed in 1940 with the collapse of Tacoma Narrows Bridge. The collapse happened due to complicated fluid structure interaction between wind and the bridge. Apart from this, this phenomenon is important in design of offshore structures, subsea pipelines and riser tubes. It also gives another method of power extraction from flow energy. The understanding of Vortex-Induced Vibration (VIV) is very important for safe design of various engineering structures. This phenomenon has been studied extensively in past half century, yet many fundamental fluid mechanics questions remain unanswered.
The shape of the cylindrical structures plays an important role in flow dynamics. The present work is two-dimensional as well as three-dimensional numerical investigations of VIV for flow past both square and circular cross-section cylinders at low Reynolds number (Re). In first part of the present work, two-dimensional numerical investigations of VIV of square cylinder are carried out to study the effect of wall confinement and mass ratio on wake flow behavior, cylinder response and loading behavior. The simulations and mesh generations are performed using commercial software ANSYS Fluent and ICEM CFD respectively. From literature, it is observed that VIV of circular cylinder at high Re (i.e. in turbulent regime) cylinder response shows branching behavior for different values of mass-damping parameters. However, such a study is not available in laminar flow regime. In the second part of present research, three-dimensional numerical investigations are carried out to study the VIV of circular cylinder at low Re (in laminar flow regime). The effect of combined mass damping parameters (while keeping mass ratio constant) on cylinder response and wake flow behavior has been studied using open source software OpenFOAM.