Simulation of moonpool water motion

Abstract

The potentially violent free-surface motion of water in a moonpool is an

important problem in the design and operation of various vessels. In this paper, im- provements in the modeling of viscous flow effects of the free-surface simulation package ComFLOW are proposed. The improved modeling enables the simulation of events in which detailed viscous flow effects and free-surface motion are strongly coupled, such as the sloshing in a moonpool.

Attention will be given to the discretization of the convective term and the modeling of turbulence. The proposed stabilized central discretization of the convective term shows clear improvements over upwind schemes. State-of-the-art turbulence models, based on the physically relevant invariants of the rate-of-strain tensor, are proposed to model the interaction between resolved and subgrid scales.

The results of these improvements will be assessed for a moonpool sloshing test case.