Hydro-elastic numeric analyses of a wedge-shaped shell structure impacting a water surface

The fluid structure interaction is simulated during the impact of a 2-d wedge on a water surface. The analysis combines the assumption of small displacements for the ideal fluid and the solid with an asymptotic formulation for accurate pressure evaluation on the wet surface boundary. Wedge deadrise angles β above approximately 30° do not fulfill this hypothesis. A fluid-heat analogy is used to obtain the regular displacement, velocity and pressure fields in the fluid domain with ABAQUS/Standard finite element code. PYTHON and FORTRAN languages are employed to connect fluid and structure data. Two methods are developed. The first method employs a weak fluid-structure coupling. The average discrepancy between our numerical results and experiments was 22% for the peak pressures for conical shell structures. The wet surface velocity was well predicted. The second method (implicit fluid-structure coupling using a convergence criterion) is more accurate. Recent results with an improved, numerical hydrodynamic model based on CFD are also presented.