CFDwavemaker: An Open-Source Library for Efficient Generation of Higher Order Wave Kinematics

Abstract

Abstract Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) for propagation of waves have become an important tool for the calculation of wave loading on offshore structures for such problems as run-up, wave slamming and other load related problems where nonlinear breaking wave kinematics is of importance. There are multiple CFD codes, both commercial and open source which today supports features related to wave propagation. Examples are OpenFOAM, ComFLOW, Basilisk, StarCCM+ and more. All of these codes require the either initialization of the domain or propagation of waves from the boundaries, with a known theoretical solution or with the use of wave paddles. In terms of higher order theoretical wave descriptions, the most frequent implementations are often limited to uni-directional regular waves, which is well defined and efficient to calculate. However, ocean waves are neither regular nor long crested. CFDwavemaker is a cross-platform open-source library which provides higher order non-linear wave kinematics for irregular and short-crested waves, purpose built for initialization and generation of waves at the domain boundary of CFD domains. The library is written in C++ and may be compiled and linked into most CFD codes. The library has built-in second order irregular wave theory and supports the use of Higher-order Spectral methods (HoS) as input through the extension Spectral Wave Data (SWD). The code is designed to utilize multiprocessing and advanced interpolation schemes which are favorable for efficient generation of higher-order wave kinematics generation.