Generation of Regular and Irregular Waves in Navier-Stokes CFD Solvers by Matching With the Nonlinear Potential Wave Solution at the Boundaries
The capability of wave generation and absorption in a viscous flow solver becomes important for achieving realistic simulations in naval and offshore fields. This study presents an efficient generation of nonlinear wave fields in the viscous flow solver by using a nonlinear potential solver called higher-order spectral method (HOS). The advantages of using a fully nonlinear potential solver for the generation of irregular waves are discussed. In particular, it is shown that the proposed method allows the CFD simulation to start at the time and over the space of interest, retrieved from the potential flow solution. The viscous flow solver is based on the open source library OpenFOAM. The potential solvers used to generate waves are the open source solvers HOS-Ocean and HOS-NWT (Numerical Wave Tank). Several simulation parameters in the CFD solver are investigated in the present study. A HOS wrapper program is newly developed to regenerate wave fields in the viscous flow solver. The wrapper program is validated with OpenFOAM for 2D and 3D regular and irregular waves using relaxation zones. Finally, the extreme waves corresponding to the 1000 year return period condition in the Gulf of Mexico are simulated with the viscous flow solver and the wave elevation is compared with the experiments.