Abstract
In recent years fish-farming is gradually moving towards more exposed offshore environments. This makes the study of loading conditions in extreme sea states increasingly relevant. Sea farms often involve light and slender structures which typically include flexible components such as nets and other farming equipment. This poses a significant challenge in model tests when it comes to the installation of measurement equipment such as pressure inducers and force panels. Reconstruction in CFD provides a meaningful tool to complement model test data and to investigate design variations when model testing is unfeasible or financially unattractive. Combined model tests and CFD form a hybrid approach resulting in synergy for both methods.
The model tests are performed to determine the overall motion behavior of the fish cage and to produce a large amount of wave impact events. However, the overall pressure distribution and resulting loads on the supporting semi-submersible structure could not be measured.
CFD is used to reconstruct the flow in and around a fish-farm concept consisting of a fish cage supported by a circular semi-submersible ring. The CFD simulations are used to get more detailed information about the loads on the supporting semi-submersible structure during specific wave events that were observed in the model tests.
The incoming undisturbed waves from the model tests are reconstructed in CFD. Furthermore, the motions of the fish cage are included in CFD by imposing the (synchronized) motions as registered during the model tests. This paper describes the iterative wave matching procedure that was applied to reconstruct the wave events in CFD and presents a comparison of the full simulation setup with experiments.
