Experimental and FNPT-RANS Investigations Into Gap-Excitation and Vortex Dynamics in a Rectangular Moonpool Interacting With Focused Waves

Moonpools are designed to provide a calm environment for lowering of equipment from ships. Considerable research effort has been invested towards understanding water column excitation within a moonpool. However, most recent investigations consider regular waves. The nature of interaction between focused waves and a moonpool is not well-understood; the present work strives to fill this research gap. A series of experiments have been carried out in a 22 m long glass flume in the Department of Ocean Engineering at IIT Madras. Two identical cuboidal boxes were affixed with a 0.15 m gap representing a rectangular moonpool. Focused waves based on a constant steepness spectrum were generated in 0.6 m water depth by a piston-type wave-paddle. The focusing point was set at the center of the moonpool and wave-focusing experiments were performed with and without the twin-body. Wave elevation at various locations along the flume was measured using five wave-gauges. Next, the experiments were numerically replicated using the in-house codes IITM-FNPT2D (for inviscid wave generation) and IITM-RANS3D (for fully viscous wave-structure interaction). Gap-excitation at the instant of focusing has been quantified and correlated with focused wave characteristics and with dynamics of spanwise vortices generated at the edges of the moonpool.

A Procedure to Calculate First-Order Wave-Structure Interaction Loads in Wave Farms and Other Multi-Body Structures Subjected to Inhomogeneous Waves

A typical assumption when performing analytical, numerical, and experimental studies in wave–structure interaction in multi-body problems such as for wave farms and very large floating structures is the homogeneity of the wave field. Important interactions between the floating elements are dependent on the direction, amplitude, and phase of the waves acting on each. Then, wave homogeneity is probably unrealistic in near-shore areas where these installations are to be deployed. In the present work, an existing interaction method, which allows the use of standard boundary element diffraction codes for solving the first order wave structure linear potential for each unique geometry in the problem, is shown to be able to account for inhomogeneous sea states across the domain of a multi-body problem requiring only minimal modification to its implementation. A procedure to use the method to include arbitrary incoming undisturbed wave conditions at each body is presented. A verification study was done by using an artificial numerical configuration to mimic an inhomogeneous wave field in a standard diffraction code, which was used as a reference. The results obtained using the interaction-method based procedure are shown to be in excellent agreement with the reference ones. Furthermore, an example of frequency inhomogeneity of the wave field in a wave farm is shown and the effects on the motion amplitudes and absorbed power are presented illustrating the applicability of the procedure.

Wave-Structure Interaction Processes in Coastal Engineering

Among one of the most challenging engineering problems, fluid-structure interaction processes are complex phenomena that have received much attention over the years [...]

Time-Dependent Wave-Structure Interaction Revisited: Thermo-Piezoelectric Scatterers

In this paper, we are concerned with a time-dependent transmission problem for a thermo-piezoelectric elastic body that is immersed in a compressible fluid. It is shown that the problem can be treated by the boundary-field equation method, provided that an appropriate scaling factor is employed. As usual, based on estimates for solutions in the Laplace-transformed domain, we may obtain properties of corresponding solutions in the time-domain without having to perform the inversion of the Laplace-domain solutions.