Dynamic Response of Cold Water Pipe (CWP) for OTEC Systems

A beam model for the CWP problem using finite element method has been considered. A computer program has been developed to carry out the free vibration analysis. Steel and concrete pipes both for 40 MWe and 1MWe OTEC plants have been analyzed. It is observed that significant change in the time periods can be affected by interposing relatively flexible pipe segments. The analysis for vortex-excited oscillations indicate that for the bigger diameter pipe (9.2 m) the critical velocity is attained only for the fundamental bending mode. For the small diameter pipe (1.5m) all the three modes considered appear to be vulnerable.