Numerical Simulation of Green Water on Deck with a Hybrid Eulerian-Lagrangian Method

Green water on the ship deck in rough sea conditions may induce extreme impulsive wave impacts on superstructures and result in severe structural damage. It is of great importance to consider green water loads in ship structure design. However, there are many challenges in predicting green water loads due to the strongly nonlinear wave–ship interactions and the multiphase, multi-scale nature of the wave impact phenomena. In this article, a three-dimensional hybrid Eulerian–Lagrangian approach is proposed for simulating green water loads on the ship deck. It is extended from an efficient and accurate two-dimensional method developed for fluid–structure interaction problems. In this method, the flow field is solved on a fixed regular Cartesian grid system in an Eulerian framework, whereas the solid body motion is tracked with a set of markers immersed in the fluid and solved in a Lagrangian framework. Two benchmark cases, green water on a fixed simplified Floating Production Storage and Offloading (FPSO) model and green water on ship, are simulated. Comparison between experimental data and numerical results shows that our method is a viable choice for predicting green water loads. Introduction In rough sea conditions, ships may undergo large-amplitude motions and suffer green water impacts due to the strongly nonlinear wave–body interaction. Large waves run up to the ship deck and impact on superstructures with huge volume of water impulsively. It can induce extreme impulsive wave impact loads on superstructures and result in severe structural damage. Thus, it is important to predict wave impact loads for ship structure design. However, there are still great challenges in predicting green water impact loads accurately because it is a flow phenomenon of high complexity and randomness due to its multiphase, highly turbulent nature with wave breaking, air entrainment, etc (Temarel et al. 2016).