FROTH: Fundamentals and Reliability of Offshore
Structure Hydrodynamics
FROTH Project
Workshop
Thursday 16 April
2015, Bath, UK
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The one day FROTH Project Workshop will
be held on Thursday, 16th April 2015, Bath, UK. The aim of the
workshop is to disseminate
the results of the FROTH project to the community at large, to inform of new
CFD developments and recent findings in offshore wave impact and to provide a
forum for discussion. The FROTH project is a close collaboration between five universities (Plymouth
University, Manchester Metropolitan University, City University, Oxford
University and University of Bath) with significant input from the Industrial
Management Group (Bureau
Veritas, DNV-GL, Lloyds Register, Trinity House, Saipem Ltd). The aim is to investigate the
detailed physics of violent hydrodynamic impact loading on rigid and elastic
structures through a carefully integrated programme of numerical modelling
and physical experiments at large scale.
Open source numerical code have been developed to simulate laboratory
experiments which were carried out in the COAST Laboratory at Plymouth
University, with the ultimate aim of providing improved guidance to
the designers of offshore, marine and coastal structures, both fixed and
floating. Whilst the hydrodynamics in the
bulk of a fluid is relatively well understood, the violent motion and
break-up of the water surface remains a major challenge to simulate with
sufficient accuracy for engineering design. Although free surface elevations
and average loadings are often predicted relatively well by analysis
techniques, observed instantaneous peak pressures are not reliably predicted
in such extreme conditions and are often not repeatable even in carefully
controlled laboratory experiments.
There remain a number of deeply fundamental open questions as to the
detailed physics of hydrodynamic impact loading, even for fixed structures
and the extremely high-pressure impulse that may occur. In particular, uncertainty exists in the
understanding of the influence of: the presence of air in the water (both
entrapped pockets and entrained bubbles) as the acoustic properties of the
water change leading to variability of wave impact pressures measured in
experiments; flexibility of the structure leading to hydroelastic response;
steepness and three dimensionality of the incident wave.
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