Violent Flow using a fully coupled SPH-HE approach

Designing structures located either off-shore or on-shore, able to withstand loads coming from large impacting waves or for entering water poses a major technological challenge. Virtual prototyping using advanced numerical simulation techniques has become an indispensable tool to meet such a challenge. This paper presents an explicit Finite Element (FE) software package with an embedded and fully coupled Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) solver. In most cases the FE part of the solver is used to evaluate the mechanical response of all structures involved, whereas the SPH method is used to solve the non-linear hydrodynamics of the violent flow. The coupling allows modelling the fluid-structure interaction. The usage of this approach will be demonstrated for the response of flexible ships and floating off-shore platforms in large waves, water entry of life boats, ditching of aircraft and ingress of water into a damaged hull. The effect of a huge wave representative of a devastating tsunami on rigid, moveable and deformable on- shore structures will also be presented. High-performance computing technology including GPU and Multi-model coupling are being used to reduce the computational demands. The presence of air mixed in water is currently being investigated by a newly developed two-phase model within SPH.