This paper gives a review on VIV experimental research. A detailed introduction of the experimental study on the cross-flow vortex-induced vibration of a towed circular cylinder in CSSRC’s towing tank is presented and classical VIV phenomena are explained and analyzed in this study. However, some results which are much different from those in the classical literatures in the past few decades are observed at the same time. For example, instead of reduced velocity Ur from 5 to 8, the “lock-in” region happened in the reduced velocity ranged from 10 to 14 in our tests, where the reduced velocity is calculated by the natural frequency. The non-dimensional frequency (oscillation frequency over natural frequency) of about 1.8 in the “lock-in” region is also different from that of 1.0 in the classical literatures. Interestingly, the author found that some of the results given by Moe and Wu (1990), Sarpkaya (1995), Govardhan and Williamson (2000), Pan zhiyuan (2005) and so on, reported the similar phenomenon. Since above listed papers have the same points of view, whether can we say that the results in this paper are possible for the case of low mass ratio. To conclude that, however, many questions need to be answered. In an effort to gain a better understanding of VIV phenomenon, this paper presents results of further analysis on the test cases and parameters.
