CFD Analysis on Similarity Criteria of Hydrodynamic Characteristics for Gravity-Installed Anchors

For reduced-scale model tests of gravity-installed anchors (GIAs), it is of great significance to extrapolate the testing results to prototype. This highlights the necessity of investigation of similarity criteria. The present work aims to find the similarity criteria of three prioritized hydrodynamic characteristics including VT, HP, and Cd for GIAs during installation in water through CFD simulations. In the present study, free falling processes of different reduced-scale T98 anchor models and prototype anchor is simulated, from which VT, HP, and Cd are extracted and analyzed to get the fitting curves for these three characteristics over reduced-scale λ. Based on these curves, hydrodynamic characteristics for prototype and other reduced-scale model can be extrapolated from model testing results. And, the researching procedure in this paper sets an example and reference to study about similarity criteria for other hydrodynamic characteristics.