Harmonic structure of the nonlinear force on a fixed ship-shaped floating production, storage and offloading vessel under dispersive phase-focused wave groups

Abstract

This paper presents a numerical investigation on the harmonic structure of hydrodynamic forces on a fixed and simplified representative floating production, storage and offloading (FPSO) vessel hull under dispersive phase-focused wave groups. The high-fidelity numerical model utilizes the two-phase flow solver in the open-source toolbox OpenFOAM. A series of cases were computed using the numerical model, where the effects of wave steepness, bow diameter, and length of the FPSO are investigated. It is found that given an FPSO under different wave steepness, the non-dimensional inline force exhibits remarkable similarity in terms of the temporal development. The harmonic structure of the inline force is only weakly dependent on the steepness of the incident wave group and the bow diameter, but strongly dependent on the FPSO length. When k p L = 2.27, where L is the length of the FPSO and kp is the wave number at peak frequency, the incident wave group is diffracted significantly by the FPSO. The entire wave–structure interaction process is largely linear, where transfer between different harmonics is rarely seen. However, when kpL is further reduced to 0.57, globally the disturbance of the FPSO on the far field incident wave group is reduced, but locally a strongly nonlinear flow occurs at the rear of the FPSO, where severe run-up occurs at the downstream stagnation point. Higher-order harmonics of inline forces are excited, and the interaction process becomes much more nonlinear.