An Experimental and Numerical Study of Added Mass and Damping for Side by Side Plates in Oscillating Flow

Abstract

Forced harmonic oscillations of seven configurations consisting of horizontal side by side plate elements are performed experimentally and numerically. The configurations are oscillated in vertical direction and represent generalized mudmats of subsea structures. The tests are performed for Keulegan-Carpenter (KC) numbers relevant for force estimation during lifting operations. Hydrodynamic added mass and damping coefficients are presented. The coefficients are found to be amplitude dependent for all configurations tested. The interaction effects between the plates increase with increasing amplitude and decreasing distance between the plates. For oscillation amplitudes small compared with the gap between the plates, the plates behave approximately like individual plates. A study of the relation between the damping force and the added mass force for the tested structures illustrates the importance of applying representative damping coefficients in numerical analysis of marine operations. Numerical results are obtained using a potential flow solver (BEM) and a viscous flow solver (CFD). Low-KC added mass coefficients predicted with the BEM are in accordance with the experiments. There is acceptable agreement between the CFD and the experiments. Best agreement is obtained for small KC numbers. For increasing KC numbers, the differences are, in general, larger. This is possibly due to the CFD being based on two-dimensional laminar flow.