Turbines and thrusters: A versatile OpenFOAM framework for modelling aerial rotors on floating bodies

Accurately modeling the interaction of aerial rotors and floating bodies is necessary for marine engineering applications like floating offshore wind turbines. This paper presents an efficient, versatile numerical method within OpenFOAM to simulate the coupled dynamics of rotors, acting as turbines or thrusters, and moored floating bodies. Employing an innovative actuator disk approach with two-way airflow-floating body coupling, the framework captures nonlinear system behavior under wind, waves, and currents without resolving rotor blades explicitly. The weighted body force implementation enables flexible rotor definition via user-defined functions and for different rotor configurations to be simulated with minimal changes to the simulation setup or mesh. Detailed methodology, validation cases and an illustrative example highlight its potential. This approach offers a useful tool for advancing marine engineering design and analysis.