Wave simulation was conducted for the period 1976 to 2005 in the South China Sea(SCS) using the wave model, WAVEWATCH-III. Wave characteristics and engineering environment were studied in the region. The wind input data are from the objective reanalysis wind datasets, which assimilate meteorological data from several sources. Comparisons of significant wave heights between simulation and TOPEX/Poseidon altimeter and buoy data show a good agreement in general. By statistical analysis, the wave characteristics, such as significant wave heights, dominant wave directions, and their seasonal variations, were discussed. The largest significant wave heights are found in winter and the smallest in spring. The annual mean dominant wave direction is northeast(NE) along the southwest(SW)-NE axis, east northeast in the northwest(NW) part of SCS, and north northeast in the southeast(SE) part of SCS. The joint distributions of wave heights and wave periods(directions) were studied. The results show a single peak pattern for joint significant wave heights and periods, and a double peak pattern for joint significant wave heights and mean directions. Furthermore, the main wave extreme parameters and directional extreme values, particularly for the 100-year return period, were also investigated. The main extreme values of significant wave heights are larger in the northern part of SCS than in the southern part, with the maximum value occurring to the southeast of Hainan Island. The direction of large directional extreme Hs values is focus in E in the northern and middle sea areas of SCS, while the direction of those is focus in N in the southeast sea areas of SCS.
WANG ZhifengZHOU LiangmingDONG ShengWU LunyuLI ZhanbinMOU LinWANG Aifang
A Constrained Interpolation Profile(CIP)-based model is developed to predict the mooring force of a two- dimensional floating oil storage tank under wave conditions, which is validated against to a newly performed experiment. In the experiment, a box-shaped floating oil storage apparatus is used. Computations are performed by an improved CIP-based Cartesian grid model, in which the THINC/SW scheme(THINC: tangent of hyperbola for interface capturing; SW: Slope Weighting), is used for interface capturing. A multiphase flow solver is adopted to treat the water-air-body interactions. The Immersed Boundary Method(IBM) is implemented to treat the body surface. Main attention is paid to the sum force of mooring line and velocity field around the body. It is found that the sum force of the mooring line increases with increasing wave amplitude. The body suffers from water wave impact and large body motions occur near the free surface. The vortex occurs near the sharp edge, i.e., the sharp bottom corners of the floating oil storage tank and the vortex shedding can be captured by the present numerical model. The present model could be further improved by including turbulence model which is currently under development. Comparison between the computational mooring forces and the measured mooring forces is presented with a reasonable agreement. The developed numerical model can predict the mooring line forces very well.
