Study of a Body Subjected to a Vertical Drop into Water – Experiment and Simulations

Sammanfattning: In computational fluid dynamics (CFD), the computational domain can be discretized using mesh- based methods or particle based methods. During this project; a CFD method that uses smoothed particle hydrodynamics (SPH), in which the computational domain is discretized by particles, is modelled and compared to mesh-based CFD methods, in which the domains are broken into a set of discrete volumes. The aim with this master thesis project is to determine whether the SPH method can replace mesh-based methods in cases that involve free surface flows and fluid-structure interac- tions (FSI’s) in order to avoid mesh-deformations. The comparison is done by studying a free fall of a torpedo shaped object, 500 mm in length, both experimentally and with numerical simulations. The CFD methods that are compared are mesh-based one-way FSI, mesh-based two-way FSI and the SPH method. The methods are created in the two simulation software ANSYS (one-way and two-way FSI) and LS-DYNA (two-way FSI and SPH). The comparisons are made by looking at experimental and numerical accelerations. The experiment gave uncertain results and there were difficulties in comparing experimental results to numerical results. When looking at all results, it is concluded that the mesh-based methods give reasonable maximum values while the SPH method gives too high values. For the mesh-based methods in ANSYS, air is present which is not the case for the methods mod- elled in LS-DYNA. When comparing the computation time for all methods, it is concluded that the presence of air increases the computation time considerably and based on the results in this project, air is not necessary to take into consideration. The aim of this project is reached by concluding that the mesh-based method in LS-DYNA is the most suitable method for the studied case, based on the following: acceleration behaviour, maximum acceleration values, computation time and the possibility to neglect air. The conclusion might be revised when future work on the SPH method has been done.