New research uses OpenFOAM to model multiple moored floating structures | CoreMarine

New research uses OpenFOAM to model multiple moored floating structures

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Download the paper for all the figures: CFD simulation of multiple moored floating structures using OpenFOAM: An open-access mooring restraints library - ScienceDirect

April 19, 2024

Mooring design is critical for emerging wind and wave energy technologies. CoreMarine has collaborated on new research using OpenFOAM, an open-source Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) package, to extend its capabilities to model floating structures using MoorDyn (lumped-mass model).

OpenFOAM is an open-source package for that can model a wide range of complex fluid flows from turbulence, to acoustics and heat transfer. In this research published in Ocean Engineering journal, CoreMariners Tanausú Almeida Medina and Jose Luis Cercos-Pita collaborated with Haifei Chen, the University of Mexico and Campus Industrial de Ferrol to simulate the behaviour of multiple individually-moored structures, as well as structures that are linked through hinges or shared mooring lines.

The paper shows that a coupled CFD-mooring model can effectively simulate the dynamic responses of floating structures and their interactions with the mooring systems. The results were verified against real-life measurements of floating breakwaters in waves and steady-state postures of an underwater towed system. The OpenFOAM results were also compared with those of a Smoothed Particle hydrodynamics simulation.

The resulting open-source foamMooring library developed through this research is a significant contribution that will be useful in advancing offshore wind, wave and tidal devices as well as ocean aquaculture farms.

You can read the full paper here, or if you’d like to nerd out further on the topic, get in touch!