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Free-Decay Heave Motion Of A Spherical Buoy, Jacob K. Colling, Saeed Jafari Kang, Esmaeil Dehdashti, Salman Husain, Hassan Masoud, Gordon Parker

Michigan Tech Publications

We examined the heave motion of a spherical buoy during a free-decay drop test. A comprehensive approach was adopted to study the oscillations of the buoy involving experimental measurements and complementary numerical simulations. The experiments were performed in a wave tank equipped with an array of high-speed motion-capture cameras and a set of high-precision wave gauges. The simulations included three sets of calculations with varying levels of sophistication. Specifically, in one set, the volume-of-fluid (VOF) method was used to solve the incompressible, two-phase, Navier–Stokes equations on an overset grid, whereas the calculations in other sets were based on Cummins and …