A New Coupled Model for the Assessment of Offshore Structures in Non-Gaussian Seas

Although wave-wave interaction phenomena in random seas have shown to lead to a departure from Gaussian statistics and therefore to a higher occurrence of extreme waves, they are usually not taken along in the assessment of the dynamic behaviour of offshore structures. Supported by a rapid increase of computational resources, the use of Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) models has become viable for studying the above mentioned wave-structure interaction phenomena. Still, these models remain computationally expensive, which impedes their use for the large domains and the long periods of time necessary for studying non-Gaussian seas. Therefore, a one-way domain decomposition strategy is proposed, which takes advantage of the recent advances in CFD as well as of the computational benefits of the higher-order spectral (HOS) models previously used to assess non-Gaussian seas. The unidirectional non-Gaussian sea obtained by this coupled HOS-CFD model shows excellent agreement with the target wave field generated by the higher-order spectral numerical wave tank. In addition, the wave-structure interaction for a simplified monopile, which is excited by a non-Gaussian sea, seems to be captured well.