EXPERIMENTAL AND NUMERICAL STUDY OF THE BEHAVIOUR AND FLOW KINEMATICS OF THE FORMATION OF GREEN WATER ON A RECTANGULAR STRUCTURE

Abstract

In this study, the behaviour of green water impacting on a fixed rectangular structure is studied, and the flow kinematics is investigated with a series of experiments and computational fluid dynamic simulations. The experiments are conducted in a two-dimensional wave flume with the structure under regular wave conditions that are scaled down by the ratio of 1:125 from the BW Pioneer FPSO (Floating production storage and offloading) operated in the Gulf of Mexico. The mean values of the horizontal and vertical velocity profiles are provided for the water and bubbly flow induced by the interaction between the rectangular structure and regular waves. CFD simulations are also performed by STAR-CCM+ using the volume-of-fluid (VOF) method based on the finite-volume method (FVM) and all of CFD results are compared with the experimental data.

Keywords

• green water
• rectangular structure
• particle image velocimetry (PIV)
• bubble image velocimetry (BIV)
• computational fluid dynamics (CFD)