NUMERICAL STUDY ON THE HYDRODYNAMIC PERFORMANCE OF VERTICAL PILE-RESTRAINED FLOATING BREAKWATERS UNDER REGULAR WAVES

Floating breakwaters are usually moored by lines or restrained by piles. The two mooring systems have different performances in hydrodynamics, motion response and wave dissipation. Based on the Navier-Stokes equation, this paper presents a 2-dimentional numerical model to study the hydrodynamic characteristics of pile-restrained floating breakwaters under regular waves. The model utilizes the Constrained Interpolation Profile (CIP) scheme to solve the convection term in the control equation, and multi-phase flow and Immersed Boundary (IB) methods to deal with the fluid-structure interaction. The present model is applied to analyze the influence of the relative breakwater width on the hydrodynamic characteristics including heave-motion response, wave forces and moments. Partial results are similar to the existing experimental results, indicating that this numerical model can simulate the motion and force responses of pile-restrained floating breakwaters.