CFD modelling of irregular and focused waves using wave reconstruction

Abstract

The real sea state is composed of the focused and steep irregular waves which makes their study very important in the design of offshore wind turbines. Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) can be used as an effective tool to study steep waves. In the present paper, the wave reconstruction method in which the numerical wave free surface elevation is reconstructed by using the Fast Fourier Transformation (FFT) is validated using the open-source CFD based model REEF3D. The validation is performed for the deep water steep irregular waves and the focused waves. The numerical results are compared in timedomain for both cases (focused and irregular waves) with the experiments. The wave peaks and the wave phases are captured well in the numerical model.