Simulation of non-breaking and breaking waves with OpenFOAM

Wave breaking is one of themost violent phenomena of air-water interface interactions, producing strongturbulence with air bubbles, water droplets, jets and sprays. These phenomenacommonly occur in ship flows and are one of the main sources of underwaternoise and white-water wakes. The investigation of these phenomena is importantin ship and ocean engineering. OpenFOAM is a valuable open source and continuummechanics library for building multi-physics simulations and its use growingrapidly in both research and industry. This paper investigates the ability ofOpenFOAM to simulate non-linear waves, wave transformation and breaking with k-휔 SST-RANSmodel through the study of wave generation and propagation over a submergedbar.In the first instance an empty numerical wave flume is constructed. In earlierversions of OpenFoam, water wave modelling was developed by various softwarepackages, such as olaFoam, waves2Foam and IHFoam. Among them, waves2Foam,developed by Jacobsen et al. (2012), is probably the most common toolkit usedin ship-wave interaction simulations. However, these packages are no longersupported in the newest standard release of OpenFOAM 5.0.0 (OF500), due toinstallation, maintenance and coding standard problems. A new framework of waveModelis instead supported for wave generation. In this study, the waves2Foamimplemented in OpenFOAM 3.0.1 (OF301) and waveModel in OF500 are employed andcompared to examine their abilities and stability in modelling of regular wavepropagation.Based on the numerical wave flume, the waves2Foam model is used to simulateboth non-breaking and breaking waves. The numerical results are compared withthe experimental measurements by Beji and Battjes (1993). Several previous studiesof breaking waves using waves2Foam have only performed numerical calculationsfor breaking waves on a beach profile (Jacobsen et al., 2012; Jacobsen et al.,2014; Zhou et al., 2017). The effect of obstacles on wave propagation wasmodelled by Gadelho et al. (2014), but they only reported non-breaking wavetransformations. In the current study, non-breaking and spilling breaking wavesgenerated by Stokes waves of different incident wave heights are investigatedwith waves2Foam.Finally, the study is extended to investigate the effects of convection schemeson the multiphase simulations. Four different schemes are tested for theirability to predict regular wave propagation as well as wave transformation andbreaking over the bar.