Fluid Structure Interaction in Marine Applications Using Open-Source Tools

The current paper describes the successful attempt to simulate coupled fluid structure interaction of a 3D solid object using open source software. Often the design of hydrodynamic appendages is performed separately by CFD and FEM simulations. The coupling of structural deformation with fluid dynamic pressure is generally done explicitly with a loose coupling implementation between engineers of different departments. In the present work we propose a tight coupling CFD+FEM solver solution where the FSI simulation is run in one environment only. First, a validation with surface piercing hydrofoil [7] is performed and then the derived methodology/setup between MBDyn, preCICE and OpenFOAM is applied to a typical hydrofoil case.