Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics: A solution for non-linear wave energy converter motions
The traditional linear models have limitations in simulating fluid- structure interaction under strong dynamic conditions. Therefore, numerical simulations have been employed to study the interaction between wave and Wave Energy Converters (WECs) here in West Cost Wave Initiative. Smoothed particle hydrodynamics (SPH) has been recently applied to many engineering applications such as marine engineering as an alternative to traditional CFD methods. SPH is a meshfree lagrangian method and therefore it is more suitable for the flows that involve distortion and moving grid such as fluid-structure Interaction in complex free surface flows.
In SPH method, a set of discrete fluid particles are scattered over the domain and its boundaries. Every particle has material properties and the flow quantities are calculated at each particle using a smoothing function. Here in the West Coast Wave Initiative, we have developed an ISPH code in order to study the interaction between wave and WECs.
We simulate a simple 2 dimensional floating body which is similar to OPT (Ocean Power Technology Inc, USA) style WEC as our initial test case - see Figure 1. The pressure and velocity animations shown here are the results of our ISPH code that was post processed using the Paraview software. The number of particles for this 2D simulation is almost 12000 and the simulation was run for 2.5 seconds with a timestep of 0.0005 seconds.
Stay tuned for more animations!
