Fluid-structure interaction simulation of floating structures interacting with complex, large-scale ocean waves and atmospheric turbulence

TL;DR

This paper introduces a comprehensive numerical framework for simulating the complex interactions between floating structures, large-scale ocean waves, and atmospheric turbulence, validated against experimental data and applied to offshore wind turbines.

Contribution

The paper develops an integrated large-scale and high-resolution two-phase flow model for fluid-structure interaction involving complex floating structures and realistic ocean conditions.

Findings

Validated the model with experimental and theoretical data.

Successfully simulated a floating offshore wind turbine with realistic wind and wave interactions.

Demonstrated the framework's capability through large-eddy simulations.

Abstract

We develop a numerical method for simulating coupled interactions of complex floating structures with large-scale ocean waves and atmospheric turbulence. We employ an efficient large-scale model to develop offshore wind and wave environmental conditions, which are then incorporated into a high resolution two-phase flow solver with fluid-structure interaction (FSI). The large-scale wind-wave interaction model is based on the two-fluid dynamically-coupled approach of Yang and Shen (2011), which employs a high-order spectral method for simulating the water motion and a viscous solver with undulatory boundaries for the air motion. The two-phase flow FSI solver, developed by Calderer, Kang, and Sotiropoulos (2014), is based on the level set method and is capable of simulating the coupled dynamic interaction of arbitrarily complex bodies with airflow and waves. The large-scale wave field solver is coupled with the near-field FSI solver by feeding into the latter waves via the pressure-forcing method of Guo and Shen (2009), which has been extended herein for the level set method. We validate the model for both simple wave trains and three-dimensional directional waves and compare the results with experimental and theoretical solutions. Finally, we demonstrate the capabilities of the new computational framework by carrying out large-eddy simulation of a floating offshore wind turbine interacting with realistic ocean wind and waves.