Simulations of Breaking Wave Impacts on a Rigid Wall at Two Different Scales with a Two-Phase Fluid Compressible SPH Model
Résumé
After years of efforts, HydrOcean and Ecole Centrale Nantes, supported by GTT, succeeded in the development of an
SPH software gathering all functionalities for relevant simulations of sloshing impacts on membrane containment systems
for LNG carriers. Based on Riemann solvers, SPH-Flow deals with two compressible fluids (liquid and gas) that interact with
the impacted structure through a complete coupling. The liquid, the gas and the structure are modeled by different kinds
of dedicated particles allowing sharp interfaces. An efficient parallelization scheme enables performing calculations with a
sufficiently high density of particles to capture adequately the sharp impact pressure pulses. The development of the bi-fluid
version led, in a first stage, to unstable solutions in the gaseous phase for pressures below the ullage pressure. This difficulty
was presented at ISOPE-2010 and has been overcome since. Simulations of a unidirectional breaking wave impacting a rigid
wall after propagating along a flume are presented in this paper. The physical phenomena involved in the last stage of the
impacts are scrutinized and compared with experimental results from the Sloshel project. A comparison between calculated
results at full scale and at scale 1:6 is proposed. Conclusions about scaling in the context of wave impacts are given.