Vibration of Piping Systems Containing a Moving Medium

The subject of vibration of piping components containing a moving medium has been studied extensively in the past three decades. Special attention has been paid on the instability of uniform and tapered tubes with various boundary conditions. On the other hand, very limited information is available for complex piping systems carrying a moving medium. This paper proposes a transfer matrix method for the vibration analysis of complicated piping networks involving bends, piping components of various diameters, and lumped masses such as valves with a moving medium. Closed-form transfer matrix for various piping elements incorporating the Coriolis effects are presented and discussion is made. The proposed approach is much more economical to use than the versatile finite element method. Moreover, it can be easily implemented in a microcomputer.