Computation of flow-induced motion of floating bodies

A computational procedure for the prediction of motion of rigid bodies floating in viscous fluids and subjected to currents and waves is presented. The procedure is based on a coupled iterative solution of equations of motion of a rigid body with up to six degrees of freedom and the Reynolds-averaged Navier–Stokes equations describing the two- or three-dimensional fluid flow. The fluid flow is predicted using a commercial CFD package which can use moving grids made of arbitrary polyhedral cells and allows sliding interfaces between fixed and moving grid blocks. The computation of body motion is coupled to the CFD code via user-coding interfaces. The method is used to compute the 2D motion of floating bodies subjected to large waves and the results are compared to available experimental data, showing favorable agreement.