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.