Modeling Green Water Load on a Deck Mounted Circular Cylinder

This article uses scaled physical and numerical modeling to investigate an idealized but complicated problem in which green water impacts a circular cylindrical structure located on top of a fixed box representative of a vessel. A focused wave group was used to overtop the box and generate the green water event, which resembled a plunging wave with air entrainment. The plunger collapsed and ran across the deck before impacting and then scattering from the cylinder. To test the adequacy of the physical modeling, nominally identical experiments were conducted in two different laboratories, in different countries. The numerical modeling comprised computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations performed using openfoam. The flow features, the force on the cylinder, and the surface elevation on top of the box are compared in detail across the two physical models and the CFD. Consistent load measurements were obtained from the two physical model tests, with force impulse results differing by less than 10%, underscoring the validity of the results, even accounting for the complexity of flow–structure interactions. A comparison with numerical model results reveals some sensitivity to experimental precision in the flow measurements on top of the box and the green water load. Nonetheless, the overall force impulse discrepancy between experiments and numerical models is within 15%, highlighting that the robustness of the methods was used despite these sensitivities. The sensitivity to CFD mesh and iterating the incident wave to match CFD and experiment are also explored. The agreement between experiment and CFD serves as an example of the utility of CFD for modeling green water loads.