Numerical simulation of wave and current interaction with a fixed offshore substructure

Abstract

Offshore substructures have been developed to support structures against complex offshore environments. The load at offshore substructures is dominated by waves, and deformation of waves caused by interactions with the current is an important phenomena. Wave load simulation of fixed offshore substructures in waves with the presence of uniform current was carried out by numerical wave tank technique using the commercial software, FLUENT. The continuity and Navier–Stokes equations were applied as the governing equations for incompressible fluid motion, and numerical wavemaker was employed to reproduce offshore wave environment. Convergence test against grids number was carried out to investigate grid dependency and optimized conditions for numerical wave generation were derived including investigation of the damping effect against length of the damping domain. Numerical simulation of wave and current interactions with fixed offshore substructure was carried out by computational fluid dynamics, and comparison with other experiments and simulations results was conducted.

Keywords

• Numerical wave tank
• Numerical wave generation
• Wave and current interaction
• Computational fluid dynamics
• Navier–Stokes equation