Design of the submerged horizontal plate breakwater using a fully coupled hydroelastic approach

Abstract

This work provides a novel approach that combines computational fluid dynamics (CFD) with computational solid mechanics (CSM) to dynamically simulate the fully coupled hydroelastic interaction between nonlinear ocean waves and a submerged horizontal plate breakwater (SHPB). Based on a systematic series of simulations, it is shown that the wave damping performance of an SHPB can be evidently improved by an appropriate extent of deformation, which can be achieved through the design of its bending stiffness by varying elasticity and/or aspect ratio. The wave attenuation effect is found to be maximized when an SHPB has a deformation amplitude close to the incident wave amplitude. By accounting for the hydroelastic effect through the fully coupled CFD+CSM approach, this work presents a new computational technique that supports the design of deformable offshore and coastal structures.

A Review on the Modelling of Wave-Structure Interactions Based on OpenFOAM

“…WSI can also involve a deforming structure. For example, flexible wave energy converters that deform with waves are shown to have higher efficiency and lower structural risk than rigid ones [106]; deforming breakwaters demonstrate evidently better wave-attenuation performance than rigid ones [107]; natural features such as sea ice and vegetations also can deform with waves [108,109]. To include the deformation significantly increases the computational challenge, because CFD itself does not contain structural deformation.…”

“…In order to simulate hydroelastic problems within OpenFOAM, Huang [119] incorporated fsiFoam with the VOF approach to model multiphase flows, furtherly, with waves2foam to model WSI (named waveFsiFoam). In this way, simulations were enabled for hydroelastic interactions of waves with a large elastic ice sheet [108] and with an elastic breakwater [107], and the accuracy was validated against experiments. Figure 10 gives an example of highly-nonlinear breaking waves interacting with a seawall that undertakes large deformations.…”

A review on the modelling of wave-structure interactions based on OpenFOAM

“…WSI can also involve a deforming structure. For example, flexible wave energy converters that deform with waves are shown to have higher efficiency and lower structural risk than rigid ones [106]; deforming breakwaters demonstrate evidently better wave-attenuation performance than rigid ones [107]; natural features such as sea ice and vegetations also can deform with waves [108,109]. To include the deformation significantly increases the computational challenge, because CFD itself does not contain structural deformation.…”

“…In order to simulate hydroelastic problems within OpenFOAM, Huang et al [119] incorporated fsiFoam with the VOF approach to model multiphase flows, furtherly, with waves2foam to model WSI (named waveFsiFoam). In this way, simulations were enabled for hydroelastic interactions of waves with a large elastic ice sheet [108] and with an elastic breakwater [107], and the accuracy was validated against experiments. Figure 11 gives an example of highly-nonlinear breaking waves interacting with a seawall that undertakes large deformations.…”

A computational framework for fluid–structure interaction with applications on stability evaluation of breakwater under combined tsunami–earthquake activity

“…Grid‐based methods have been widely used, for instance, the most popular method is finite element (FE) method, and Adeli and Kumar (1995) played a huge role in promoting the application of this method, who presented distributed algorithms for the FE analysis of large structures; Yu and Adeli (1993) presented an object‐oriented FE modeling approach for solution of complex engineering systems; Kumar and Adeli (1995) developed a common class of object‐oriented data structures for generation and display of data distribution among the workstations and interprocess communication scheme. Also, the FE method is also often adopted to solve FSI problems (Ghaemmaghami et al., 2012; Huang et al., 2021), and among them, Abaqus software and Ansys software are two widely used FE analysis platforms. However, the mesh will produce serious distortion, resulting in a large calculation error and even termination of the calculation when this method based on grid information is used to deal with large deformation problems.…”