Recent flow testing of stainless steel hardware in a high pressure/high temperature water environment produced an apparent fluid-structural instability. The source of instability was investigated by studying textbook theory and by performing NASTRAN finite element analyses. The modal analyses identified the mode that was being excited, but the flutter instability analysis showed that the design is stable if minimal structural damping is present. Therefore, it was suspected that the test hardware was the root cause of the instability. Further testing confirmed this suspicion.
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