An Experimental Investigation of the Flow Field around Yawed Stranded Cables

Abstract : An experimental study was conducted to investigate the flow field about stranded cables. The objective was to gain insight into the flow mechanisms associated with the generation of fluid forces on cables. Five rigid cable models and a circular cylinder were tested in a wind tunnel. The models represented full-scale cable geometries and were yawed at four different cable angles (90, 60, 40, and 20 degrees) for Reynolds numbers in a range from 5,800 to 13,800 based on cable diameter and freestream velocity. Smoke flow visualization and hot wire anemometry were used to collect qualitative and quantitative data, consisting of pictures of the vortex wake, vortex shedding angles and wake widths, shedding frequency and spanwise coherence of the vortex wake. Results show that the cable geometry influences the flow field about the cable. Keywords: Fluid dynamics; Hydrodynamic forces; Flow visualization; Stranded cables; Cables; Vortex shedding; Wire ropes; Towed cables. (kt)