CFD Modeling of Regular and Irregular Waves Generated by Flap Type Wave Maker

Abstract

The improvement of wave generation in numerical tanks represents the key factor in ocean engineering development to save time and effort in research concerned with wave energy conversion. For this purpose, this paper introduces a numerical simulation method to generate both regular and irregular waves using Flap-Type wave maker. A 2D numerical wave tank model is constructed with a numerical beach technique, the independence of the numerical beach slope is tested to reduce the wave reflections. The different governing parameters of the Flap type wave maker were studied such as periodic time dependency and length of the flap stroke. The linear wave generated was validated against the wave maker theory WMT, the numerical results agreed with WMT. The Pierson-Moskowitz model is used to generate irregular waves with different frequencies and amplitudes. The numerical model succeeded to generate irregular waves which was validated against published experimental data and with Pierson-Moskowitz spectrum model using Fourier expansion theory in the frequency domain. Useful results are presented in this paper based on the numerical simulation to understand the characteristics of the waves. This paper produces a full guide to generate both regular and irregular waves numerically using ANSYS-CFX approach to solve the 2D Unsteady Reynolds Averaged Navier-Stokes Equation (URANS).