The application of laminar numerical wave tank for a heaving buoy hydrodynamics study in low-turbulence nonlinear waves

Numerical Wave Tanks (NWTs) allow for in-depth investigations into the hydrodynamics and wave responses of floating objects. Thus, they are widely used during the design phase of many offshore platforms and devices. Such problems often feature low turbulence, with wave propagation and wave-object interaction being the key features. In this paper, the merits of using a laminar flow model for a NWT with a free-to-heave buoy, subject to second order Stokes waves in a low sea state is investigated. The simulations are implemented using the interFoam solver, which is embedded in OpenFOAM. The time series of waves measured upstream and downstream of the buoy, and the buoy hydrodynamics are compared to analytical and experimental results for accuracy evaluations. It is shown that, due to the low turbulence level of the problem, the laminar approach can deliver more accurate results than turbulent models, such as Reynolds-averaged Navier-Stokes Simulation (RANS) or partially-averaged Navier-Stokes Simulation (PANS). Moreover, the simulation time of the laminar simulations is significantly shorter than to those of RANS and PANS.