Simulation of non-breaking and breaking waves with OpenFOAM

Abstract

Wave breaking is one of the most violent phenomena of air-water interface interactions, producing strong turbulence with air bubbles, water droplets, jets and sprays. These phenomena commonly occur in ship flows and are one of the main sources of underwater noise and white-water wakes. The investigation of these phenomena is important in ship and ocean engineering. OpenFOAM is a valuable open source and continuum mechanics library for building multi-physics simulations and its use growing rapidly in both research and industry. This paper investigates the ability ofOpenFOAM to simulate non-linear waves, wave transformation and breaking with k-e SST-RANS model through the study of wave generation and propagation over a submerged bar.In the first instance an empty numerical wave flume is constructed. In earlier versions of OpenFoam, water wave modelling was developed by various software packages, such as olaFoam, waves2Foam and IHFoam. Among them, waves2Foam,developed by Jacobsen et al. (2012), is probably the most common toolkit used in ship-wave interaction simulations. However, these packages are no longer supported in the newest standard release of OpenFOAM 5.0.0 (OF500), due to installation, maintenance and coding standard problems. A new framework of wave Model is instead supported for wave generation. In this study, the waves2Foamimplemented in OpenFOAM 3.0.1 (OF301) and wave Model in OF500 are employed and compared to examine their abilities and stability in modelling of regular wave propagation. Based on the numerical wave flume, the waves2Foam model is used to simulate both non-breaking and breaking waves. The numerical results are compared with the experimental measurements by Beji and Battjes (1993). Several previous studies of breaking waves using waves2Foam have only performed numerical calculations for breaking waves on a beach profile (Jacobsen et al., 2012; Jacobsen et al.,2014; Zhou et al., 2017). The effect of obstacles on wave propagation was modelled by Gadelho et al. (2014), but they only reported non-breaking wave transformations. In the current study, non-breaking and spilling breaking waves generated by Stokes waves of different incident wave heights are investigated with waves2Foam. Finally, the study is extended to investigate the effects of convection schemes on the multiphase simulations. Four different schemes are tested for their ability to predict regular wave propagation as well as wave transformation and breaking over the bar.

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Identifiers

ORCID for Dominic Hudson: orcid.org/0000-0002-2012-6255

ORCID for Pandeli Temarel: orcid.org/0000-0003-2921-1242

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