Modeling of Unsteady Friction and Viscoelastic Damping in Piping Systems

In real systems, the phenomena, such as pipe-wall viscoelasticity, unsteady friction or fluid structure interaction induce additional damping and dispersion of transient pressure waves than that defined by classical waterhammer. In this paper, unsteady friction models and viscoelastic damping models will be presented and a theoretical formulation of the viscoelastic damping in piping systems without cavitation will be developed. Firstly, the friction factor will be presented as the sum of the quasi-steady part and the unsteady part related to the instantaneous local acceleration and instantaneous convective acceleration. This unsteady friction model has been incorporated into the method of characteristic algorithm (MOC). Secondly, the damping will be defined in terms of viscoelastic effect attributed to a second viscosity µ’. This model is solved using the Finite Difference Method. Finally, numerical results from the unsteady friction and viscoelastic models are compared with results of laboratory measurements for waterhammer cases with low Reynolds number turbulent flows. This comparison validates the new viscoelastic model.