AN OVERSET MULTIPHASE FLOW SOLVER FOR WATER ENTRY PROBLEMS

This paper extends our recent work on the development of a multi-region based numerical wave tank (Ferrer et al., 2016}, which was based on the framework of OpenFOAM, to solve water entry problems in the contest of marine launch and recovery operations. The original stationary interface linking strategy is further developed to permit the dynamic coupling of several moving regions. This enables the method to deal with large-amplitude motions for structures slamming into water waves. A background grid and one or more component meshes are firstly generated to cover the whole computational domain and the sub-domains surrounding the structures, respectively. During computation, the background mesh is fixed while the small grids could move freely or as prescribed without deformation or re-generation. It effectively circumvents the error-prone dynamic deformation of a single-block mesh as well as the complex and time-consuming re-generation of mesh. A test case of dam breaking hitting an obstacle is firstly conducted to verify the developed code by comparing the numerical solution against experimental data. Then the code is applied to solve vertical and oblique water entry of wedges. The obtained results agree well with the analytical solution and other numerical outcomes reported in the literature. This demonstrate the validity and accuracy of the present method.