  Slender structures immersed in a cross flow can experience vibrations induced
by vortex shedding (VIV), which cause fatigue damage and other problems. VIV
models in engineering use today tend to operate in the frequency domain. A time
domain model would allow to capture the chaotic nature of VIV and to model
interactions with other loads and non-linearities. Such a model was developed
in the present work: for each cross section, recent velocity history is
compressed using Laguerre polynomials. The compressed information is used to
enter an interpolation function to predict the instantaneous force, allowing to
step the dynamic analysis. An offshore riser was modeled in this way: Some
analyses provided an unusually fine level of realism, while in other analyses,
the riser fell into an unphysical pattern of vibration. It is concluded that
the concept is promissing, yet that more work is needed to understand orbit
stability and related issues, in order to further progress towards an
engineering tool.
