CFD Modelling coupled with Floating Structures and Mooring Dynamics for Offshore Renewable Energy Devices using the Proteus Simulation Toolkit

Abstract

In this work, the coupling of novel opensource tools for simulating two-phase incompressible flow problems with fluid-structure interaction and mooring dynamics is presented. The open-source Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) toolkit Proteus is used for the simulations. Proteus solves the twophase Navier-Stokes equations using the Finite Element Method (FEM) and is fully coupled with an Arbitrary Lagrangian-Eulerian (ALE) formulation for mesh motion allowing solid body motion within the fluid domain. The multi-body dynamics solver, Chrono, is used for calculating rigid body motion and modelling dynamics of complex mooring systems. At each time step, Proteus computes the forces from the fluid acting on the rigid body necessary to find its displacement with Chrono which will be used as boundary conditions for mesh motion. Several verification and validation cases are presented here in order to prove the successful coupling between the two toolkits aforementioned. These test cases include wave sloshing in a tank, floating body dynamics under free and wave-induced motion for different degrees of freedom (DOFs), and mooring dynamics using beam element theory coupled with rigid body dynamics and collision detection. The successful validation of each component shows the potential of the coupled methodology to be used for assisting the design of offshore renewable energy devices.