DHI Scientist Introduces New Water Surface Simulation Method

DHI scientist Johan Roenby from the Department of Ports and Offshore Technology has invented a new water surface simulation algorithm, dubbed isoAdvector, which is applicable to a wide range of engineering areas and will help make simulation process cheaper, more flexible and more accurate, according to DHI. 

Johan Roenby explained: “One of the main advantages of isoAdvector is its ability to move water surfaces across computational meshes, where the cells are not just cubes, but may have any shape.

“The ability to work with general cell shapes makes the tedious process of generating meshes around complex structures such as offshore wind turbine foundations or wave energy converters much faster and easier for the engineers. This in turn makes the whole simulation process cheaper and more agile.” 

The new algorithm is implemented in the open source Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) coding framework, OpenFOAM, and is released as open source.

The new method is a result of a project called ‘Breaking the Code of Breaking Waves’ that was carried out over the last two and a half years, led by Roenby and conducted in close collaboration with Associate Professor Henrik Bredmose from DTU Wind Energy and Professor Hrvoje Jasak from Faculty of Mechanical Engineering and Naval Architecture, University of Zagreb.

The scientist presented the new computer algorithm in an article published yesterday in Royal Society Open Science.