Calculation of Wave Forces on Cylindrical Piles Using a 3D Numerical Wave Tank
Offshore constructions generally include a large number of vertical cylinders in the support structure. The calculation of wave forces on a vertical cylinder and hydrodynamic effects on it in the presence of neighbouring cylinders is of practical interest. In this paper, a 3D numerical model is used to calculate wave forces on bottom fixed cylindrical piles. Two cases are considered in this study: a single cylinder and a pair of tandem cylinders. A scenario with multiple cylindrical structures in close proximity introduces complex wave-structure interactions and would be of great interest to observe this in detail in a three-dimensional simulation. The wave force exerted on a cylindrical pile is numerically calculated by integrating the pressure and the wall shear stress around the surface of the cylinder. In the case of the single cylinder, the force calculated by the model is compared to the force predicted by the Morison formula and MacCamy-Fuchs theory. In the second case, the pair of cylinders is aligned in the direction of the incoming waves. The numerically calculated inline wave force on each cylinder is compared to the analytical solution for this setup and a good agreement is seen. The Reynolds-Averaged Navier-Stokes equations are used as the governing equations for the fluid flow in the numerical model. The convective terms are discretized using a 5th-order conservative finite difference WENO scheme. A 3rd-order accurate TVD Range-Kutta scheme is used for time discretization. Chorin’s projection method is used to discretize the pressure. The Poisson equation for pressure is solved using a preconditioned BiCGStab algorithm. The level set method is used to obtain a sharp representation of the free water surface. Turbulence in the flow is simulated using the k-ω model. The numerical model is adapted to parallel processing using the MPI library to improve the computing performance of the code.