CFD Study of Regular Waves on a Jacket Structure

Abstract

The jacket-type platforms are one of the most common kinds of offshore structures used worldwide. These structures are installed in the open oceans. When the waves in open ocean interact with the jacket structure, it leads to a highly intricate free surface around the structure. These waves exert wave forces on the jacket members. This makes the study of the wave–jacket interaction very important. The numerical investigation of regular waves on the jacket structure is quite challenging due to their highly complex free surface during the interaction. Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) can be used as an effective tool to study regular waves interacting with the jacket structure. The present investigation is performed using the open-source computational fluid dynamics (CFD) model REEF3D. A highly turbulent free surface during the wave–jacket interaction is observed due to the increased contribution of the nonlinear wave components. The complex turbulent flow features around the jacket structure due to wave–structure interaction are well captured by the CFD model. The model uses the Reynolds-averaged Navier–Stokes (RANS) equations to provide detailed information about the wave hydrodynamics. The level set method (LSM) is used for modelling the free surface. For time discretization, third-order total variation diminishing (TVD) Runge–Kutta scheme is used. The complex geometries are implemented in the model using a ghost-cell immersed boundary method. The numerical code is fully parallelized using the message passing interface (MPI).