Locally-refined free-surface flow simulations for moored and floating offshore platforms

The simulation of free-surface flow around moored or floating objects faces a series of challenges concerning the flow modelling and the numerical solution  method. During the development of the ComFLOW simulation method many of these challenges have been tackled, as there are wave propagation, absorbing boundary conditions, turbulence modeling, fluid-solid body interaction and numerical efficiency. Several of these challenges will be discussed in the paper. To demonstrate the current capabilities of ComFLOW, a number of simulation results for engineering applications from the offshore industry will be presented. Examples are wave impact against a semi-submersible offshore platform, an oscillating buoy, and a free-fall life boat dropping into wavy water. For these
applications, MARIN has carried out several validation experiments.