Simulating an Offshore Capping Stack with CONVERGE
CONVERGE’s volume of fluid (VOF) and fluid-structure interaction (FSI) modeling allow us to capture the real-world physics of offshore capping stack placement. In the oil and gas industry, capping stacks are brought in to contain oil leaks in the case of a subsea blowout. In this simulation, the capping stack is tethered to a crane on the surface. The crane maneuvers the capping stack onto the faulty blowout preventer as a mixture of oil and gas streams out. We employed CONVERGE’s species-based VOF solver to simulate the oil and gas jet leaking out into the surrounding water. The mooring cable model enabled us to simulate the tethering cable, and we used rigid-body FSI to capture the interaction between the oil/gas jet and the capping stack. In the first view, you can see how the capping stack wobbles due to the forces from the oil/gas jet. The second view shows how Adaptive Mesh Refinement adds cells when and where they are needed to resolve the jet dynamics. CONVERGE’s fully autonomous meshing eliminates user meshing time for complex geometries and seamlessly accommodates moving boundaries.
Convergent Science's CONVERGE is an innovative computational fluid dynamics (CFD) software that eliminates the grid generation bottleneck from the simulation process through autonomous meshing.
