Liquid impact is a key issue in various industrial applications (seawalls, offshore structures, breakwaters, sloshing in tanks of liquefied natural gas vessels, wave energy converters, offshore wind turbines, etc). Numerical simulations dealing with these applications
have been performed by many groups, using various types of numerical methods. In terms of the numerical results, the outcome is often impressive, but the question remains of how relevant these results are when it comes to determining impact pressures. The numerical models are too simplified to reproduce the high variability of the measured pressures. In fact, for the time being, it is not possible to simulate accurately both global and local effects. Unfortunately it appears that local effects predominate over global effects when the behaviour of pressures is considered.
Having said this, it is important to point out that numerical studies can be quite useful to perform sensitivity analyses in idealized conditions such as a liquid mass falling under gravity on top of a horizontal wall and then spreading along the lateral sides. Simple analytical models inspired by numerical results on idealized problems can also be useful to predict trends.
The talk is organized as follows: After an introduction on some of the industrial applications, it will be explained to what extent numerical studies can be used to improve our understanding of impact pressures. Results on a liquid mass hitting a wall obtained by various numerical
codes will be shown.