Easy to build, modular and large scale pipe conveying fluid experimental setup

The pipe conveying fluid is a classic fluid structure interaction experiment. First studied for industrial applications such as liners and pipelines, it became a “paradigm” of non-linear dynamics in the same way as the vertical rotating shaft. Hundreds of papers studying different pipe instabilities and different phenomena with various numerical and analytical methods have been published in the last decades. However, many studies lack the comparison with experimental data to validate the analytical models and numerical simulations. Indeed, designing and building a pipe conveying fluid experimental setup can prove to be a long and a burdensome process. This paper presents an easy to build pipe conveying fluid experimental setup built in the LM2 laboratory at Polytechnique Montréal. Fig. 1 presents the global architecture of this experimental rig. This large scale setup uses relatively high speed cameras to track the pipe in three dimensions. It does not require heavy construction or major plumbing and electrical work. Moreover, it is removable and can be modified easily to observe different phenomena with various large scale pipes or boundary conditions. Lastly, it is relatively inexpensive as it costs less than 20 000 US dollars including all the sensors and acquisition systems.