A Numerical Formulation for Simulating Free-Surface Hydrodynamics

TL;DR

This paper presents a numerical method combining Cartesian-grid, immersed-body, and volume-of-fluid techniques to simulate free-surface hydrodynamics, including breaking waves, with improved parallel computing performance.

Contribution

It introduces a novel numerical scheme with multigrid and MPI communication enhancements for accurate free-surface flow simulation around ships.

Findings

Numerical predictions closely match laboratory measurements.

The method effectively captures wave breaking phenomena.

Parallel implementation improves computational efficiency.

Abstract

Cartesian-grid methods in combination with immersed-body and volume-of-fluid methods are ideally suited for simulating breaking waves around ships. A surface panelization of the ship hull is used as input to impose body-boundary conditions on a three-dimensional cartesian grid. The volume-of-fluid portion of the numerical algorithm is used to capture the free-surface interface, including the breaking of waves. The numerical scheme is implemented on a parallel computer. Recent improvements to the numerical scheme are discussed, including implementation of a new multigrid procedure and conversion to MPI communication. Numerical predictions are compared to laboratory measurements of a towed transom-stern model.