Experimental and Numerical Study on Slamming Impact

Abstract

This paper presents the results of experimental and numerical research on the slamming phenomenon. Two experimental techniques were proposed in this study. The traditional free drop tests were carried out. However, the free drop tests done in this study using an LM guide showed excellent repeatability, unlike those of other researchers. The coefficients of variation for the drop test done in this experiment were less than 0.1. The other experimental technique proposed in this study was a novel concept that used a pneumatic cylinder. The pneumatic cylinder could accelerate the specimen over a very short distance from the free surface. As a result, high rates of repeatability were achieved. In the numerical study, the development of in-house code and utilization of commercial code were carried out. The in-house code developed was based on the boundary element method. It is a potential code. This was mostly applied to the computation of the wedge entry problem. The commercial code utilized was FLUENT. Most of the previous slamming research was done under the assumption of a constant body velocity all through the impact process, which is not realistic at all. However, the interaction of a fluid and body were taken into account by employing a user-defined function in this study. The experimental and numerical results were compared. The in-house code based on BEM showed better agreement than that of the FLUENT computation when it cames to the wedge computation. However, the FLUENT proved that it could deal with a very complex geometry while BEM could not. The proposed experimental and numerical procedures were shown to be very promising tools for dealing with slamming problems.