Fluid Structure Interactions Research Group

Numerical Investigations on Fluid-Structure Interactions Using Particle Based Methods for Marine Applications
Fanfan Sun ffs1g09@soton.ac.uk - School of Engineering Sciences Supervisors Dr. Mingyi Tan and Professor Jing Tang Xing

Introduction & Motivation Many fluid-structure interaction problems often involve violent fluid motions in marine engineering field, such as slamming and green water when a ship travels in rough seas which can produce overall momentum change and deformation of the hull. Hence, it is important to consider the fluid-structure interactions, breaking waves and flow separations in order to avoid damages caused by dynamic loads on the structures. As it is difficult to obtain analytical solutions for such complicated problems, numerical methods and experiments are adopted in investigations. Traditional grid-based numerical methods like finite element method have been developed but they are not efficient for large deformation problems. Particle based methods like Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) are an alternative to simulate fluid flows due to their Lagrangian and meshless properties.

Theory The formulation of SPH is often divided into two steps: integral representation and then particle approximation. f ( x) f ( x' )W ( x x' , h)dx' Integral representation:
N

Particle approximation:

f ( xi )
j 1

mj
j

f ( x j ) Wij and

i j 1

m jWij

here h is the smoothing length defining the influence area Navier-Stokes equations: (1)continuity equation ; (2)momentum equation; (3)energy equation 1).
D Dt v x

2).

Dv Dt

1 x

De 3). Dt

v x

Applying SPH method to equations 1 , 2 and 3

D i a). Dt
N i j 1 j

mj

vi pj
2 j

Wij xi )vij

and
Wij xi

b).
ui 2 i

Dvi Dt
i i

mj

j j

Wij xi

i j 1

c).

Dei Dt

1 2

mj (
j 1

pi
2 i

considering unity property of kernel function showing below other forms of

Figure 1: Rough sea slamming on offshore structure (3.bp.blogspot.com/.../s200/freakwave.jpg) Figure 2: slamming on ship

SPH equation can be funded

W ( x x' , h)dx' 1

N j 1

mj
j

Wij xi

Objective To develop a numerical approach combing the smoothed particle hydrodynamics method for fluid and other methods, FEM for example, for structures to simulate violent fluid-structure interactions.

Investigation of Convergence of SPH Convergence of the integral approximation and particle approximation adopted in SPH is studied using a simple function f(x)=exp(-x) by comparing the numerical results with analytical data
For integral approximation,

Methodology Hydrodynamics problems are generally expressed in the form of partial differential equations which is normally impossible to obtain analytical solutions for. Numerical solutions are necessary and SPH method is one of the efficient method to solve this type of problems. The key ideas include: Discreting the problem domain by a set of arbitrarily distributed particles. No connectivity for these particles is needed (meshfree) Approximating the field function by the integral representation method (integral function representation) Using particles to represent the kernel approximation by replacing the integration term with the discrete particle volume (compact support) Performing the particle approximation at every time step (adaptive) Approximating every term related to field function in the PDEs to produce a set of ODEs in discrete form with respect to time only (Lagrangian) Solving ODEs with explicit integration algorithm to obtain the time history of all the field variables for all the particles

e x 'W ( x x' , h)dx'

Discretise the problem domain into N points with smoothing length h. Results agrees with analytical solution Figure 3. comparing analytical results and kernel approximation results. For particle approximation,
N

xi j 1

mj
j

xj

Wij

Discretise the problem domain into N particles Results agrees with analytical solution well Figure 4. comparing analytical results and particle approximation results.

Conclusions SPH is a pure meshfree, particle based method which is widely used for fluid simulations especially rough sea motion simulations SPH approximations give accurate and reliable results Fluid simulation will finally be coupled with structure simulation using, for example, finite element method.

FSI Away Day 2010