Small vibrations of a sphere in a spherical volume of viscous fluid

Abstract

Problems of the vibration of bodies in confined viscous fluids have been solved to determine the added masses and damping coefficients of rods [1–3] and floats [4–5]. The solutions of these problems, based on the use of simplifications of the boundary-layer method [4–6], are obtained analytically in general form and are in good agreement with the experimental data. However, in each specific case the possibility of using such solutions for given values of the fluid viscosity and vibration frequency must be justified either experimentally [2, 4, 5] or theoretically as, for example, in [1], where an analytic solution was obtained for concentric cylinders. The present paper offers a general solution of the problem of the small vibrations of a sphere in a spherical volume of fluid valid over a broad range of variation of the dimensionless kinematic viscosity. The limiting cases of this solution for both high and low viscosity are considered. The asymptotic expressions obtained are compared with calculations based on the analytic solution.