Technical and Economic Readiness Review of CFD-Based Numerical Wave Basin for Offshore Floater Design

As Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) and High Performance Computing (HPC) technologies matured in many other industries, the offshore industry has begun to recognize CFD-based Numerical Wave Basin (NWB) as a design tool to evaluate offshore floater design more efficiently and with less uncertainty than the conventional ways relying on empirical methods. The recent NWB technology development has focused on the customization of CFD software for offshore design practices and validation of the developed analysis tools/procedures against physical model tests. Development has now extended to simulation of fully coupled hull-mooring-riser systems. Technology readiness of the NWB for field application is demonstrated for two benchmark problems: Vortex-induced motion of a multi-column floater Global performance of a multi-column floater in extreme wave environment The results indicates that the CFD-based numerical wave basin, although still computationally expensive, is technically ready to be a complementary tool to physical wave basin for offshore platform global performance design.