A Hybrid Numerical Model to Address Fluid Elastic Structure Interaction

Abstract

Hydroelasticity is an important problem in the field of ocean engineering. It can be noted from most of the works published as well as theories proposed earlier that this particular problem was addressed based on the time independent/ frequency domain approach. In this paper, we propose a novel numerical method to address the fluid-structure interaction problem in time domain simulations. The hybrid numerical model proposed earlier for hydro-elasticity (Sriram and Ma, 2012) as well as for breaking waves (Sriram et al 2014) has been extended to study the problem of breaking wave-elastic structure interaction. The method involves strong coupling of Fully Nonlinear Potential Flow Theory (FNPT) and Navier Stokes (NS) equation using a moving overlapping zone in space and Runge kutta 2nd order with a predictor corrector scheme in time. The fluid structure interaction is achieved by a near strongly coupled partitioned procedure. The simulation was performed using Finite Element method (FEM) in the FNPT domain, Particle based method (Improved Meshless Local Petrov Galerkin based on Rankine source, IMPLG_R) in the NS domain and FEM for the structural dynamics part. The advantage of using this approach is due to high computational efficiency. The method has been applied to study the interaction between breaking waves and elastic wall.