Numerical simulation of floating bodies in extreme free surface waves

In this paper, we use the in-house Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) flow code AMAZON-SC as a numerical wave tank (NWT) to study wave loading on a wave energy converter (WEC) device in heave motion. This is a surface-capturing method for two fluid flows that treats the free surface as contact surface in the density field that is captured automatically without special provision. A time-accurate artificial compressibility method and high resolution Godunov-type scheme are employed in both fluid regions (air/water). The Cartesian cut cell method can provide a boundary-fitted mesh for a complex geometry with no requirement to re-mesh globally or even locally for moving geometry, requiring only changes to cut cell data at the body contour. Extreme wave boundary conditions are prescribed in an empty NWT and compared with physical experiments prior to calculations of extreme waves acting on a floating Bobber-type device. The validation work also includes the wave force on a fixed cylinder compared with theoretical and experimental data under regular waves. Results include free surface elevations, vertical displacement of the float, induced vertical velocity and heave force for a typical Bobber geometry with a hemispherical base under extreme wave conditions

Detached eddy simulation of turbulent flow around square and circular cylinders on Cartesian cut cells

© 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Square and circular cylinders in three-dimensional turbulent flows are studied numerically using the LES and DES turbulence models. One aim of the present study is to implement the LES and DES turbulence models in a cell-centered finite volume method (FVM) developed for solving the Navier-Stokes equations on Cartesian cut cells. The Cartesian cut cell approach is known to be robust for problems in geometrically complex domains with fixed or moving boundaries. For the purpose of validating the present numerical model, the current flow past fixed square and circular cylinders at moderate Reynolds numbers is tested first. Comparison of the computed results with experimental data reveals that the DES models are superior to the conventional LES and RANS models. The second aim of the present study is to assess the performance of different RANS based DES turbulence models. By means of the comparison of results obtained with the 0-equation mixing-length, 1-equation S-A and 2-equation k-ω based DES models for the flow over the same circular cylinder, some recommendations are proposed. According to the present study, in terms of accuracy the 1-equation S-A based DES model is very promising. Beside this, if the computational cost is the main concern, the 0-equation mixing-length based DES model might be an ideal option, achieving a good balance between accuracy and efficiency

A numerical study of a freely floating lifeboat in regular waves

Copyright © 2018 by the International Society of Offshore and Polar Engineers (ISOPE) In the present paper, the open source toolbox OpenFOAM was applied for analysis of the hydrodynamic force and motion of a floating lifeboat in regular waves. The Reynolds averaged Navier-Stokes (RANS) equations were solved and the free surface tracking was achieved by using the volume of fluid method. An overset mesh method was applied for the moving boundary of the lifeboat, in which a body-fitted mesh was generated around the lifeboat using the utility snappyHexMesh and a hexahedral background mesh was produced by the utility blockMesh. The field values were interpolated in the overlapping area between these two layers of meshes. The hydrodynamic forces and the motion of the lifeboat were calculated under the condition that the lifeboat was off-centered in the wave flume to mimic the effects of a larger mother ship. Due to the unsymmetrical condition, full six-degree of freedom (DOF) motion needs to be taken into account. The predicted hydrodynamic force and surface elevation for the fixed lifeboat, and the six DOF motion of the lifeboat were compared to the experimental data. Satisfactory agreement was achieved except the roll moment and motion, for which large discrepancies were observed

A multi-region coupling scheme for compressible and incompressible flow solvers for two-phase flow in a numerical wave tank

We present a multi-region coupling procedure based on the finite-volume method and apply it to two-phase hydrodynamic free surface flow problems. The method combines the features of one incompressible and one compressible two-phase flow solvers to obtain a coupled system which is generally superior to either solver alone. The coupling strategy is based on a partitioned approach in which different solvers, pre-defined in different regions of the computational domain, exchange information through interfaces, i.e. areas separating these regions. The interfaces act as boundary conditions passing the information from one region to the other mimicking the finite-volume cell-to-face interpolation procedures. This results in high performance computing coupled simulations whose functionality can be further extended in order to build a generic numerical wave tank accounting for incompressible flow regions as well as compressibility and aeration effects. We select a series of preliminary benchmarks to verify this coupling procedure which includes the simulation of a hydrodynamic dam break, the propagation and reflection of regular waves, the convection of an inviscid vortex, pseudocavitation, a water column free drop in a closed tank and a plunging wave impact at a vertical wall. The obtained results agree well with exact solutions, laboratory experiments and other numerical data

Numerical simulation of water impact of solid bodies with vertical and oblique entries

The flow problem of hydrodynamic impact during water entry of solid objects of various shapes and configurations is simulated by a two-fluid free surface code based on the solution of the Navier-Stokes equations (NSE) on a fixed Cartesian grid. In the numerical model the free surface is captured by the level set function, and the partial cell method combined with a local relative velocity approach is applied to the simulation of moving bodies. The code is firstly validated using experimental data and other numerical results in terms of the impact forces and surface pressure distributions for the vertical entry of a semi-circular cylinder and a symmetric wedge. Then configurations of oblique water entry of a wedge are simulated and the predicted free surface profiles during impact are compared with experimental results showing a good agreement. Finally, a series of tests involving vertical and oblique water entry of wedges with different heel angles are simulated and the results compared with published numerical results. It is found that the surface pressure distributions and forces predicted by the present model generally agree very well with other numerical results based on the potential flow theory. However, as the current model is based on the solution of the NSE, it is more robust and can therefore predict, for example, the formation and separation of the thin flow jets (spray) from surface of the wedge and associated ventilation phenomena for the cases of oblique water entry when the horizontal velocity is dominant. It is also noted that the potential flow theory can result in over-estimated negative pressures at the tip of the wedge due to its inherent restriction to nonseparated flows. © 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved

Numerical investigation of air enclosed wave impacts in a depressurised tank

This paper presents a numerical investigation of a plunging wave impact event in a low-filling depressurised sloshing tank using a compressible multiphase flow model implemented in open-source CFD software. The main focus of this study is on the hydrodynamic loadings that impinge on the vertical wall of the tank. The detailed numerical solutions compare well with experimental results and confirm that an air trapped plunging wave impact causes the vertical wall to experience pulsating pressure loadings in which alternate positive and negative gauge pressures occur in sequence following the first applied pressure peak. The strongest pulsations of the pressure are found to be near the air pocket trapped by the water mass. The instantaneous pressure distribution along the vertical wall is nearly uniform in the area contained by the air pocket. The phases of pulsating pressures on the wall are in synchronisation with the expansion and contraction of the trapped air pocket. The pocket undergoes changes in shape, moves upwards with the water mass and eventually breaks up into small parts. A careful integration of the wall pressure reveals that the vertical structure as a whole experiences pulsating horizontal impact forces. It is found that the average period of pulsation cycles predicted in the present study is around 5–6 ms, and the loading pulsations are quickly damped out in View the MathML source0.1–0.2s. Further exploratory investigation of the fluid thermodynamics reveals that the temperature inside the trapped air pocket rises quickly for about 2 ms synchronised with the pocket's first contraction, then the generated heat is rapidly transferred away in around 3 ms

Numerical simulation of phase-focused wave group interaction with an FPSO-shaped body

Copyright © 2018 by the International Society of Offshore and Polar Engineers (ISOPE) The present paper summarizes the results for numerical simulation of a fixed FPSO-shaped body in uni-directional phase-focused wave groups, which is prepared as a short report for the CCP-WSI Blind Test Workshop on Focused Wave Impact on a Fixed FPSO at the 28th International Ocean and Polar Engineering Conference (ISOPE 2018). The numerical simulations were carried out using the open source toolbox OpenFOAM. An overset mesh method was applied, where two layers of mesh were generated, namely the background mesh and the overlapping body-fitted mesh. The incident focused wave groups were first validated against the experimental data at several positions. With the propagation of the waves, it was found that the waves generated by the numerical model were slightly dissipated due to numerical diffusion. Therefore, smaller wave crest was predicted from the numerical model. Then the simulations were conducted for the same wave conditions with the FPSO structure in place. The surface elevation and the pressure at several locations based on the validation criteria are reported

Modelling wave interaction with deformable structures based on a multi-region approach within OpenFOAM

© 2017 by the International Society of Offshore and Polar Engineers (ISOPE). This paper presents the development of a multi-region computational fluid-structure dynamics (CFSD) method which is integrated in our virtual wave structure interaction solver wsiFoam, based on the open-source OpenFOAM library, in order to account for the hydro-elastic effects produced by violent wave impacts against deformable bodies. This strategy relies entirely on the finite volume method (FVM) and does not require any third-party solvers, which renders it suitable for efficient parallel computing. We validate this novel approach against previous experimental and numerical results corresponding to a dam break of water impacting on a highly deformable plate as well as a flexible wedge entering water at a constant speed. In general, our preliminary results agree qualitatively well with previous data whilst the performance of parallel implementation evidences the potential of this method to be used in future high performing computing (HPC) applications

A GPU based compressible multiphase hydrocode for modelling violent hydrodynamic impact problems

This paper presents a GPU based compressible multiphase hydrocode for modelling violent hydrodynamic impacts under harsh conditions such as slamming and underwater explosion. An effort is made to extend a one-dimensional five-equation reduced model (Kapila et al., 2001) to compute three-dimensional hydrodynamic impact problems on modern graphics hardware. In order to deal with free-surface problems such as water waves, gravitational terms, which are initially absent from the original model, are now considered and included in the governing equations. A third-order finite volume based MUSCL scheme is applied to discretise the integral form of the governing equations. The numerical flux across a mesh cell face is estimated by means of the HLLC approximate Riemann solver. The serial CPU program is firstly parallelised on multi-core CPUs with the OpenMP programming model and then further accelerated on many-core graphics processing units (GPUs) using the CUDA C programming language. To balance memory usage, computing efficiency and accuracy on multi- and many-core processors, a mixture of single and double precision floating-point operations is implemented. The most important data like conservative flow variables are handled with double-precision dynamic arrays, whilst all the other variables/arrays like fluxes, residual and source terms are treated in single precision. Several benchmark test cases including water-air shock tubes, one-dimensional liquid cavitation tube, dam break, 2D cylindrical underwater explosion near a planar rigid wall, 3D spherical explosion in a rigid cylindrical container and water entry of a 3D rigid flat plate have been calculated using the present approach. The obtained results agree well with experiments, exact solutions and other independent numerical computations. This demonstrates the capability of the present approach to deal with not only violent free-surface impact problems but also hull cavitation associated with underwater explosions. Performance analysis reveals that the running time cost of numerical simulations is dramatically reduced by use of GPUs with much less consumption of electrical energy than on the CPU

An overset mesh based multiphase flow solver for water entry problems

This paper extends a recently proposed multi-region based numerical wave tank (Martínez-Ferrer et al., 2016 [1]) to solve water entry problems in naval engineering. The original static linking strategy is developed to enable the dynamic coupling of several moving regions. This permits the method to deal with large-amplitude motions for structures slamming into water waves. A background grid and one or more component meshes are firstly generated to overlay the whole computational domain and the sub-domains surrounding the structures, respectively. During computation, the background mesh is fixed while the small grids move freely or as prescribed without deformation and regeneration. This effectively circumvents the large and often excessive error-prone dynamic deformation of a single-block mesh as well as the complex and time-consuming mesh regeneration. Test cases of dam breaking with and without obstacles are first conducted to verify the developed code by comparing the numerical solution against experimental data. Then the new code is used to solve prescribed and free-fall water entry problems. The obtained results agree well with experimental measurements and other computational results reported in the literature