Simulation of floating platforms for marine energy generation

The goal of this work is to study the dynamics of floating platforms that are designed for marine energy generation. This work is done in collaboration with Tecnalia R&I, a company settled in the Basque Country which designs this kind of platforms. To our purpose we present a method for the simulation of two-phase flow with the presence of floating bodies. We consider the variable density incompressible Navier-Stokes equations and discretize them by the finite element method with a variational multiscale stabilization. A level-set type method is adopted to model the interphase between the two fluids. The mixing or smearing in the interphase is prevented with a compression technique. Turbulence is implicitly modeled by the numerical stabilization. The floating device simulation is done by a rigid body motion scheme where a deforming mesh approach is used. The mesh deforms elastically following the movement of the body. Simulation of a decay test on a cube is performed and the results are presented in this paper. All the simulations are done with the open source finite elements parallel software FEniCS-HPC.