Benjamín Suárez Arroyo

The particle finite element method (PFEM): an effective numerical technique for solving marine, naval and harbour engineering problems

This book contains selected papers from the Fourth International Conference on Computational Methods in Marine Engineering, held at Instituto Superior Tcnico, Technical University of Lisbon, Portugal in September 2011. Nowadays, computational methods are an essential tool of engineering, which includes a major field of interest in marine applications, such as the maritime and offshore industries and engineering challenges related to the marine environment and renewable energies. The 2011 Conference included 8 invited plenary lectures and 86 presentations distributed through 10 thematic sessions that covered many of the most relevant topics of marine engineering today. This book contains 16 selected papers from the Conference that cover CFD for Offshore Applications, Fluid-Structure Interaction, Isogeometric Methods for Marine Engineering, Marine/Offshore Renewable Energy, Maneuvering and Seakeeping, Propulsion and Cavitation and Ship Hydrodynamics. The papers were selected with the help of the recognized experts that collaborated in the organization of the thematic sessions of the Conference, which guarantees the high quality of the papers included in this book.We present some developments in the Particle Finite Element Method (PFEM) for the solution of complex coupled problems in marine, naval and harbour engineering involving fluid-soil-structure interaction (FSSI). The PFEM uses an updated Lagrangian description to model the motion of nodes (particles) in a continuum domain containing fluid, soil/rock and structures subdomains. A mesh connects the nodes defining the discretized domain where the governing equations for each of the constituent materials are solved with the FEM. The stabilization for dealing with an incompressibility material is introduced via the finite calculus (FIC) method. An incremental iterative scheme for solving the non linear transient FSSI problem is described. The procedure to model frictional contact conditions and material erosion at fluid-solid and solid-solid interfaces is described. We present examples of application of the PFEM to solve FSSI problems in marine, naval and harbour engineering such as the motion of rocks by water streams, the stability of breakwaters and constructions under sea waves, the sinking of ships and the collision of a ship with ice blocks.