In offshore applications, details of viscous flow effects can become relevant when predicting e.g. drag forces on the columns of oil drilling rigs, or the flow around a semisubmersible in figure 1. This motivates a novel approach for efficiently simulating viscous flow effects at high Reynolds numbers with the CFD simulation tool ComFLOW.
In ComFLOW, the Navier–Stokes equations can be solved for one-phase and for two-phase flow. The equations are discretized second-order in space, and second-order in time. An Improved Volume-of-Fluid (IVOF) algorithm is used for free-surface advection and reconstruction [1, 2].
Modeling viscous flow effects in high Reynolds number flows requires a turbulence model that provides accurate results on coarse grids. We pursue to achieve a high local grid resolution in a computationally efficient manner. Both approaches are tested for flows around a square cylinder: grid refinement at Reynolds numbers 10 and 100, and the turbulence model at Reynolds number 22,000.
