Breaking Waves

The goal of this proposed work is to develop superior methods for determining the onset of breaking waves and their impact loads on offshore support structures for wind turbines in shallow waters, using high-fidelity CFD simulations. To accomplish this goal, we will partner with Fishermen's Energy LLC, who will provide metocean data and structural models that will inform our activities. We will examine breaking wave conditions in the U.S. for proposed offshore wind turbine support structures. The proposed work will be carried out with OpenFOAM, an open-source software capable of large-scale, parallelizable, multiphase ow calculation. The open source framework will enable widespread sharing in the industry.