Sea Short Waves

Short Wave in the Sea — ANSYS Fluent CFD Simulation

Description

This project presents a CFD simulation of short waves on the sea surface — a fundamental problem in coastal, marine, and offshore engineering. Using ANSYS Fluent's ability to generate waves directly at a boundary, you'll create a realistic propagating wave field and track how the air–water interface evolves over time, all based on First-Order Airy (linear) wave theory. This is your introduction to wave generation in CFD, a capability that underpins the design of breakwaters, offshore platforms, ships, and coastal structures. Within the Marine Engineering: Beginner CFD Training Package, this project introduces the defining feature of marine CFD — the free surface — and the technique of generating a controlled wave field for realistic ocean environments.

Methodology

The 2D sea domain (210 cm long × 76 cm high) is designed in SpaceClaim and meshed in ANSYS Meshing with an unstructured grid of roughly 55,000 cells suited to free-surface wave tracking. Air and water are modeled with the VOF multiphase model using sharp interface modeling and an explicit formulation with implicit body force. The open-channel wave boundary condition is applied at the inlet to send waves into the domain based on First-Order Airy wave theory. The case is solved with a transient, pressure-based solver using the laminar viscous model — appropriate for this wave problem — with adaptive time stepping for stable, efficient wave propagation. PRESTO! pressure discretization and Compressive volume-fraction discretization are used to keep the air–water interface sharp, and the initial water region is patched to set up the sea surface.

Analysis

Post-processing focuses on the velocity contours and the evolving free surface, observing how the moving waves propagate across the domain and induce vortices and turbulence in the air above the surface. From these results you can follow how the wave field develops in time and how the air–water interface deforms as the waves travel. Wave modeling of this kind is essential across naval architecture, coastal protection, renewable wave energy, and offshore oil and gas, and the open-channel wave boundary condition mastered here is the gateway to simulating realistic ocean environments — from ship seakeeping to wave–structure interaction. By the end of this project, you'll be able to set up a transient VOF wave-generation simulation, apply the open-channel wave boundary condition, configure the solver and discretization to keep the interface sharp, and interpret the propagating wave field.