An SPH study of slamming and splashing at the bow of SYSU vessel

Abstract

Operating in extreme sea conditions, vessels often meet horrible wave impact which generates wave breaking and splashing at the bow and poses a great threat to staff safety and structural strength. Characterized with the ticklish issues e.g. multiphase interface and free surface large deformation, the study of slamming and splashing needs more reliable numerical tools. Smoothed particle hydrodynamics (SPH) method, benefiting from its Lagrangian meshless nature, shows superior performance in simulating slamming and splashing properties, which is employed in this paper to model the slamming process of the Sun Yat-sen University (SYSU) scientific research vessel. 2D wedges and 3D hemisphere water-entry benchmarks are simulated to validate the SPH model. After extending 2D to 3D simulation, SPH-based and finite volume method (FVM) -based solvers are exploited with various slamming cases for the SYSU scientific research vessel. Comparisons of the numerical results on dynamic response and bow slamming hydrodynamics of the SYSU vessel between SPH and FVM are performed in this paper. The numerical results demonstrate that except for precise prediction of hull dynamics, SPH is good at tracking the complex interface and splashing details, which possesses practical applicability in the simulation of violent fluid–structure interaction.