Analysis of Structures in Very Shallow Water: CFD Analysis of Wave Propagation and Breaking Waves

Abstract

Structures installed in very shallow water are experiencing forces from a very disturbed flow field, including rapidly changing gradients and breaking waves. Estimating loads on these structures usually involves running full 3D CFD analyses to predict the flow field and calculate the forces. This paper is comparing a full 3D CFD simulation using OpenFOAM to a novel method of wave propagation with a multilayer solver based on Basilisk in order to establish the applicability of such a method in estimating loads on structures in shallow water. By applying the multilayer method the analysis time is reduced so much that one can estimate kinematics with a statistical approach where one analyses a wide range of sea states to estimate loading on the structure. This approach is common in deep water where much of the kinematics are simplified.