Abstract
For most of the twentieth century naval hydrodynamics, and more recently, wave energy hydrodynamics have been limited to the realms of theory and physical experiments. Both of these methods of fluid flow analysis are constrained through scope, cost and size of facility. The advent of high speed digital computing has brought with it a new dimension for analysing fluid flows, that of numerical modelling. This paper aims to harness this progress in computing power and established commercial computational fluid dynamics (CFD) codes to create a numerical analogue to the physical test flumes that are in operation in many hydrodynamic labs. Using numerical wavemakers will allow for the use of different shaped wavemakers that would be otherwise impossible to implement in a physical waveflume, these non- conventional shapes will be investigated.
This paper presents the well established wavemaker theory. This is then adapted to obtain the hydrodynamic coefficients of added mass and damping for two novel shaped wavemakers. The different wavemaker geometries are compared on the basis of their theoretical wave absorption efficiencies at various tuned frequencies. Wavemaking simulations using ANSYS CFX are then presented and the results are discussed.