Narrow Results

Wave impact on one and two structural beams with rectangular cross section is simulated with a two-dimensional finite volume method, solving the unsteady Euler equations and employing a VOF-type method for the description of the free surface. Four different test series are carried out, each corresponding to a wave impact scenario in the experimental database of Sterndorff [2002]. For the case of wave impact on a single structural element the numerical results show good agreement with measured force time histories. In the computations featuring two beams, the prediction of the shadowing effect of the first beam on the second is in reasonable agreement with the experimental data. However, the force peak on the second beam is somewhat over-predicted. The calculations successfully predict a second peak in the force time series of the second beam, which is caused by airborne water shipped over the first beam. Throughout the work, spurious spikes of very short duration appear in the computed load time series, originating from the changing of the flow separation location along the lower edge of the beams.

The smoothed particle hydrodynamics (SPH) method is a meshless numerical modeling technique. It has been applied in many different research fields in coastal engineering. Due to the drawback of its kernel approximation, however, the accuracy of SPH simulation results still needs to be improved in the prediction of violent wave impact. This paper compares several different forms of correction on the first-order derivative of ISPH formulation aiming to find one optimum kernel approximation. Based on four benchmark case analysis, we explored different kernel corrections and compared their accuracies. Furthermore, we applied them to one solitary wave and two dam-break flows with violent wave impact. The recommended method has been found to achieve much more promising results as compared with experimental data and other numerical approaches.

The wave impact on marine structures is concerning in ocean and coastal engineering. Cylinders are important components of various marine structures such as piers of sea-crossing bridge, columns of oil and gas platforms and subsea pipelines. In this study, the interaction of solitary wave with a submerged horizontal cylinder and a surface-piercing vertical cylinder are numerically studied by the Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) code SPHinXsys. SPHinXsys is an open-source multi-physics library based on the weakly compressible SPH and invokes the low-dissipation Riemann solver for alleviating numerical noises in the simulation of fluid dynamics. The capability of SPHinXsys in reproducing the fluid fields of solitary wave propagating through cylinders is demonstrated by comparing with the experimental data. With the validation in hand, the features of the wave–structure process are examined.