Added mass

In fluid mechanics, added mass or virtual mass is the inertia added to a system because
an accelerating or decelerating body must move (or deflect) some volume of
surrounding fluid as it moves through it. Added mass is a common issue because the object
and surrounding fluid cannot occupy the same physical space simultaneously. For simplicity
this can be modeled as some volume of fluid moving with the object, though in reality "all"
the fluid will be accelerated, to various degrees.
The dimensionless added mass coefficient is the added mass divided by the displaced fluid
mass i.e. divided by the fluid density times the volume of the body. In general, the added
mass is a second-order tensor, relating the fluid acceleration vector to the
resulting force vector on the body.[1]
Contents
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1 Background
2 Virtual mass force
3 Applications
3.1 Naval architecture
4 See also
5 References
6 External links

Background[edit]
Friedrich Bessel proposed the concept of added mass in 1828 to describe the motion of
a pendulum in a fluid. The period of such a pendulum increased relative to its period in a
vacuum (even after accounting for buoyancy effects), indicating that the surrounding fluid
increased the effective mass of the system.[2]
The concept of added mass is arguably the first example of renormalization in physics. [3][4]
[5]
The concept can also be thought of as a classical physics analogue of the quantum
mechanical concept of quasiparticles. It is, however, not to be confused with relativistic
mass increase.
It is often erroneously stated that the added mass is determined by the momentum of the
fluid. That it is not so is clear from considering the case of the fluid in a large box where the
fluid momentum is exactly zero at every moment of time. The added mass is actually
determined by the quasi-momentum: the added mass times the body acceleration is equal to
the time derivative of the fluid quasi-momentum. [4]

Virtual mass force[edit]

Unsteady forces due to a change of the relative velocity of a body submerged in a fluid can
be divided into two parts: the virtual mass effect and the Basset force.
The origin of the force is that the fluid will gain kinetic energy at the expense of the work
done by an accelerating submerged body.
It can be shown that the virtual mass force, for a spherical particle submerged in an inviscid,
incompressible fluid is[6]

where bold symbols denote vectors,

is the fluid flow velocity,

is the spherical

particle velocity,
is the mass density of the fluid (continuous phase),
volume of the particle, and D/Dt denotes the material derivative.

is the

The origin of the notion "virtual mass" becomes evident when we take a look at the
momentum equation for the particle.

where
is the sum of all other force terms on the particle, such
as gravity, pressure gradient, drag, lift, Basset force, etc.
Moving the derivative of the particle velocity from the right hand side of the equation
to the left we get

so the particle is accelerated as if it had an added mass of half the fluid it

displaces, and there is also an additional force contribution on the right hand
side due to acceleration of the fluid.

Applications[edit]
The added mass can be incorporated into most physics equations by
considering an effective mass as the sum of the mass and added mass. This
sum is commonly known as the "virtual mass".
A simple formulation of the added mass for a spherical body permits Newton's
classical second law to be written in the form
becomes
One can show that the added mass for a sphere (of radius
) is
For a general body, the added mass becomes a tensor (referred to as the
induced mass tensor), with components depending on the direction of
motion of the body. Not all elements in the added mass tensor will have
dimension mass, some will be mass length and some will be
mass length2.
All bodies accelerating in a fluid will be affected by added mass, but since
the added mass is dependent on the density of the fluid, the effect is often
neglected for dense bodies falling in much less dense fluids. For situations
where the density of the fluid is comparable to or greater than the density of
the body, the added mass can often be greater than the mass of the body
and neglecting it can introduce significant errors into a calculation.

For example, a spherical air bubble rising in water has a mass of

but

an added mass of
Since water is approximately 800 times denser than
air (at RTP), the added mass in this case is approximately 400 times the
mass of the bubble.

Naval architecture[edit]
These principles also apply to ships, submarines, and offshore platforms. In
ship design, the energy required to accelerate the added mass must be
taken into account when performing a sea keeping analysis. For ships, the
added mass can easily reach or of the mass of the ship and therefore
represents a significant inertia, in addition to frictional and wavemaking drag
forces.
In aircraft (other than lighter-than-air balloons and blimps), the added mass
is not usually taken into account because the density of the air is so small.

See also[edit]

Basset force for describing the effect of the body's relative motion
history on the viscous forces in a Stokes flow
BassetBoussinesqOseen equation for the description of the motion of
and forces on a particle moving in an unsteady flow at low Reynolds
numbers
Darwin drift for the relation between added mass and the Darwin drift
volume
KeuleganCarpenter number for a dimensionless parameter giving the
relative importance of the drag force to inertia in wave loading
Morison equation for an empirical force model in wave loading, involving
added mass and drag
Response Amplitude Operator for the use of added mass in ship design