Narrow Results

In this paper, water entry process of air launched AUV is investigated by employing fully coupled finite element method and arbitrary Lagrange–Euler formulation (FEM-ALE) and using penalty coupling technique. Numerical model is established to describe the hydrodynamic characteristics and flow patterns of a high-speed water entry AUV. The effectiveness and accuracy of the numerical simulation are verified quantitatively by the experiments of the earlier study. Selection of suitable advection method and mesh convergence study is carried out during experimental validation process. It is found that appropriate mesh size of impact domain is crucial for numerical simulations and second-order Van Leer advection method is more appropriate for high speed water entry problems. Subsequently, the arbitrary Lagrange–Euler (ALE) algorithm is used to describe the variation laws of the impact load characteristics with water entry velocities, water entry angles and different AUV masses. Dimensionless impact coefficient of AUV at different velocities calculated using ALE method is compared with SPH results. This reveals that ALE method can also simulate the water entry process accurately with less computational cost. This research work can provide beneficial reference information for structure design of AUV and for selection of the water entry parameters.

• (1)The RAOs of OC4-DeepCWind platform motions are more sensitive to the low-frequency wave than the high-frequency wave. The nonlinear motion responses for platform heave and pitch motions are comparatively remarkable.
• (2)The pitch motion of OC4-DeepCWind platform is much more apparently influenced by the height of center of gravity (COG) than surge and heave motions. The lower COG height within a suitable range leads to a smaller fluctuation amplitude of platform pitch motion in waves.
• (3)A large horizontal displacement abruptly occurs to the OC4-DeepCWind platform when one mooring line is failure. The risk of failure for the other mooring lines significantly increases.

To better understand the hydrodynamic performance of a floating support platform in various wave environments, a two-phase CFD solver naoe-FOAM-SJTU based on the open source CFD toolbox OpenFOAM is applied to investigate the hydrodynamic characteristics and motion performance of the OC4-DeepCWind platform. Moreover, the restoring force and moment of mooring lines are simulated using the solver in time domain. The studies of grid sensitivity and time step refinement are first conducted to determine an appropriate time step and mesh size. Then hydrodynamic responses of the floater in free-decay tests are analyzed and compared with experimental data, and the motion performance of the platform in regular waves with different parameters is also investigated. In addition, the platform motion responses with one mooring line broken and different heights of center of gravity are explored. It is shown that simulation results have good agreement with published data, and several conclusions can be drawn through the study. The RAOs of platform motions are found to be more sensitive to the low-frequency wave than the high-frequency wave. Nonlinear motion responses are comparatively remarkable in platform heave and pitch motions. Besides, the lower height of center of gravity within a suitable range is benefit to the stability of floating platform. Survival condition with broken mooring line should be paid enough attention to avoid the failure of other mooring lines.