Peter van der Plas: Local and adaptive grid refinement for free-surface flow simulations

Promotor         : Prof. dr. A.E.P. Veldman
Co-promotor   : Dr. ir. R. Luppes

Abstract:

In this talk I will present the results from my PhD research on local grid refinement in simulations of free-surface flows. This work was performed in the context of the in-house CFD model ComFLOW, a Cartesian-grid based discretization of the Navier–Stokes equations with a cut-cell approximation of the free-surface and geometry. During this talk, we will focus on typical applications from the field of offshore engineering, e.g. prediction of wave impact forces and the simulation of greenwater loading on the deck of a ship. Local grid refinement can be used to significantly reduce the size of the computational grid, and hence the computational time, while maintaining a similar degree of accuracy. In this talk I will look back on the various difficulties of designing and implementing a local grid refinement method in an existing CFD model such as ComFLOW, with a large variety of applications (offshore, coastal engineering, …) and a large number of features (discretization schemes, boundary conditions, etc.).