An adaptive numerical method for free surface flows passing rigidly mounted obstacles
It provides a computational tool for engineering analysis of wave-structure interactions, but the method is incremental (hybrid finite volume/finite difference with adaptive meshing).
The paper develops an adaptive numerical method for simulating free-surface flows around submerged structures, demonstrating accuracy on benchmark problems (sloshing container, channel flow past cylinder) and applying it to a realistic offshore oil platform scenario.
The paper develops a method for the numerical simulation of a free-surface flow of incompressible viscous fluid around a streamlined body. The body is a rigid stationary construction partially submerged in the fluid. The application we are interested in the paper is a flow around a surface mounted offshore oil platform. The numerical method builds on a hybrid finite volume / finite difference discretization using adaptive octree cubic meshes. The mesh is dynamically refined towards the free surface and the construction. Special care is taken to devise a discretization for the case of curvilinear boundaries and interfaces immersed in the octree Cartesian background computational mesh. To demonstrate the accuracy of the method, we show the results for two benchmark problems: the sloshing 3D container and the channel laminar flow passing the 3D cylinder of circular cross-section. Further, we simulate numerically a flow with surface waves around an offshore oil platform for the realistic set of geophysical data.