NUMERICAL WAVE TANK DEVELOPMENT AS A VIRTUAL MODEL FOR WAVE TESTING FACILITY

The study of Fluid Structure Interaction (FSI) between offshore structures and ocean waves has been scrutinized in the oil and gas industry. However, the traditional method of studying FSI using experimental wave tank suffers from shortcomings in terms of time and money. The dissertation presents the development of a Numerical Wave Tank (NWT) using open source CAD modelling software Salome and Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) toolbox OpenFOAM as an alternative for FSI studies. The study addressed the gap on the lack of experiment validation on the OpenFOAM waves simulations and provides reproducibility of similar waves simulation studies using a complete open source toolbox