Numerical Simulation of Interactions between Water Waves and a Moored-Floating Breakwater

Abstract

Floating breakwaters offer a cost-efficient alternative to common emerged rubble mound breakwaters in deep water coastal areas or harbors with poor seabed conditions. Often, simple box type structures with a suitable mooring system are considered. The motion of the moored box and the resulting tension forces in the cables have to be known during the design process. The accurate determination of these properties is therefore of high significance to produce a safe and economical design. In this paper, a numerical model for determining the influence of the mooring system on the floating body dynamics is developed and incorporated into the opensource CFD solver REEF3D.