Fluid-structure Interaction for slamming of ships

Background

The marine and offshore industry is moving to harsher seas for exploration, operation, and transport. The uncertainty of wave impacts and slamming and the subsequent structural response makes the harsh environment challenging to designers and structural engineers.

Main objective

To use and develop numerical methods to identify and quantify the influence of hydroelasticity in breaking wave impingements on ships. 

First results

One of the biggest challenges is the high computational cost of fluid-structure interaction simulations with the commonly used partitioned method. One of the causes is that the ratio of added-mass to ship mass leads to instability when higher than 1 during the iterative exchange of information between fluid and structure. In this research, we propose a much faster algorithm for stronger coupling to compute hydroelastic effects without subiteration. When all eigenmodes of the structure are known (simple structures), indeed, no subiteration is required. When a limited number of eigenmodes is known (complex structures), the stronger coupling leads to an improved first estimate which reduces the required number of iterations with respect to partitioned coupling.

Participants