Wedge-Shaped Shell Structure Impacting a Water Surface

This paper presents a study of fluid structure interaction during the impact of a ship on a water surface. The analysis combines the assumption of small displacements for the ideal fluid and the solid with an asymptotic formulation for accurate pressure evaluation on the wet surface boundary. A fluid-heat analogy is used to obtain the regular displacement, velocity and pressure fields in the fluid domain with ABAQUS/Standard finite element code. PYTHON and FORTRAN languages are also employed to connect fluid and structure data. Two methods are developed. The first method employs a weak fluid-structure coupling. The average discrepancy between our numerical results and experiments was 22% for the peak pressures for conical shell structures. The wet surface velocity was well predicted. The second method (implicit fluid-structure coupling using a convergence criterion) is more accurate. Recent results with an improved, numerical hydrodynamic model based on CFD are also presented.