The present paper studies the performance of a tuned mass damper (TMD) installed in a 183 m tall chimney located at the edge of the wake shed by another chimney. Numerical and experimental results are available. For the simulations, wind action is considered by solving several 2D flow problems on a selected number of horizontal planes, in the transverse direction to the stacks. On such planes, Navier-Stokes equations are solved to estimate the fluid action at different positions of the chimneys and standard interpolation techniques are applied in the vertical direction. An Arbitrary Lagrangian-Eulerian (ALE) approach is used to consider the moving domain, and a fractional-step scheme is used to solve the fluid field. For the structural modelling, chimneys are meshed using 3D beam finite elements. The time integration procedure used for the structural dynamics is based on the standard second order Bossak method. For each period of time, the fluid problem is solved, the aeroelastic analysis is carried out and the geometry of the fluid mesh of each plane is updated according to the structural movements. With this procedure and model updating techniques, the response of the leeward chimney is evaluated for different scenarios, revealing an interesting dependence of the TMD performance on the wind speed and direction.

This paper shows how numerical simulation can be used to explain the dynamic behaviour of two chimneys in close proximity. For similar wind speeds, the dynamic response of the leeward chimney depends on alignment of wind directions with a vector from the new to the old chimney. Evidence is presented that Enhanced Vortex Shedding (EVS) caused significant vibrations on the old 183 m high reinforced concrete chimney at Rugeley Power Station during several years of coexistence with its replacement. Strong vibrations were observed under certain conditions of wind speed and direction during construction of the new chimney, consistent with predictions of a performance study. To avoid excessive response of the old chimney during its final years of coexistence with the new one, a tuned mass damper (TMD) was installed together with a monitoring system to verify the effectiveness of the TMD. The monitoring system allowed confirming that vibration levels for winds from the south-west direction of the new chimney were higher than for similar wind speeds from other directions, a finding validated by numerical simulation using advanced computational fluid dynamics (CFD) and fluid-structure interaction (FSI) techniques.