Mathematical Modeling and Analysis of Flutter in Long-Span Suspension Bridges and in Blood Vessel Walls

A review of several research directions in the area of mathematical analysis of the flutter phenomenon is presented in the present study. Flutter is known as a structural dynamical instability, which occurs in a solid elastic structure interacting with a flow of gas or fluid and consists of violent vibrations of the structure with rapidly increasing amplitudes. The focus of this review is a collection of models of fluid-structure interactions, for which precise mathematical formulations are available. The main objects of interest are analytical results on such models, which can be used for flutter explanation, qualitative, and even quantitative treatments of the models. This study does not pretend to be a comprehensive review of the enormous engineering literature on analytical, computational, and experimental aspects of the flutter problem. The entire survey provides a brief exposition of the results obtained in several selected papers or groups of papers on the following topics: (1) Bending-torsion vibrations of coupled beams; (2) flutter in transmission lines; (3) flutter in rotating blades; (4) flutter in hard disk drives; (5) flutter in suspension bridges; and (6) flutter of blood vessel walls. The last topic of the review is devoted to the most well-known cases of flutter, i.e., flutter in aeroelasticity. Namely, the precise analytical results obtained in the author’s several recent papers on a specific aircraft wing model in a subsonic, inviscid, incompressible airflow are discussed.