Validation Study of Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics in Fluid and Structure Interaction and the Comparison to Boundary Element Method

Abstract

The purpose of this research is to validate the usage of Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) method in solving fluid-structure interaction problems as well as study its advantages and disadvantages compared to another well-known technique Boundary Element Method (BEM). The goal is achieved by 1) evaluating the Response Amplitude Operator (RAO) and 2) analyzing the drifting motion of a 1:10 scaled 3m-discus oceanographic buoy developed by the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), using both experimental and numerical approaches. For the experimental study, the testing was carried out in an 8-m long wave tank and the buoy motions were measured using non-intrusive techniques. For numerical analysis, the project used DualSPHysics — open source code — and ANSYS AQWA — one of the leading software widely used in the marine applications — to simulate all the experimental scenarios via SPH and BEM techniques respectively. It is observed that while BEM has clear advantages in computational time and the ability to study applicable range of frequencies, SPH, in addition to its capability to simulate drifting motion of the floating structure, has shown to outperform the RAO predictions from BEM (especially in low frequency region). In higher frequency regions, the lack of experimental data hinders the conclusion on which method might be more suitable, as both have their own limitations.