Studying the Impact of Unstructured Mesh Adaptation on Free Surface Flow Simulations

Engineering offshore problems require a continuous progress in the simulation of systems coupling structures and fluids with interfaces. The needs concern complex interface motions and fluid-structure interaction with slamming. The proposed methodology combines, in a parallel message passing algorithm, a level set based interface tracking, a standard finite element projection method on unstructured meshes and a dynamic mesh adaptation process for time dependent problems. This numerical method is applied to the study of a wedge impacting a free surface in two dimensions [1, 2] and the three-dimensional simulation of a breaking water column which impacts an obstacle [3] for which experimental results are available.