In this paper, a 3-D hybrid model based on the smoothed particle hydrodynamics (SPH) and the Quasi Arbitrary Langangian-Eulerian Finite Element Method (QALE-FEM) is presented to investigate the nonlinear water wave interaction with floating structure. As a fully Lagrangian mesh-free approach, the smoothed particle hydrodynamics (SPH) method is emerging as a potential tool for simulating fluid flows and the fluid-structure interaction. And the SPH method has proved to show good performance in simulating the wave-structure interactions in view of its accuracy and stability. But one of the weaknesses emerged during its application to the water wave problems is that SPH model is computationally very demanding. As a nonlinear potential flow solver, the QALE-FEM has the advantage on the simulation of fully nonlinear water waves with high computational efficiency even in large domains. But the QALE-FEM model has the difficulty in dealing with extreme nonlinear water wave problem like slamming, breaking waves and violent interaction with floating structures. By making full use of respective advantage of these two methods, the hybrid model has great potentials in simulating the wave-float interactions in terms of accuracy and efficiency. These two methods are integrated by using a zonal approach. The hybrid method is then validated against the experimental results. Numerical results obtained from this paper show good agreement with experiment data.
The study of interactions between waves and floating bodies have received extensive attentions because of its importance during the design and operation of the offshore and marine structures. In order to study this problem adequately, extreme wave condition especially in large-scale needs to be considered. On the other hand, the wave breaking near structure and the corresponding response of the structure are also the key to study this problem. This implies that an effective numerical model shall be able to deal with both large-scale oceans wave and small-scale near-field physics simultaneously.
