Abstract

This paper proposes a new partitioned coupling approach to simulate the wind induced excitation of a membrane structure with ponding water. This approach uses three different solvers to simulate wind, water and membrane structure. The main assumption here is that the interaction between the wind and water can be neglected due to the small depth and small fetch of the water, relative to the size of the membrane structure. This assumption results in a coupling strategy where the structural solver independently interacts with the wind and water solver. The results from this method is compared with a straightforward approach, where a two-phase solver, modeling the wind and water, is coupled to a structural solver. The obtained results agreed very well with the reference modeling approach, where all the interactions are taken into account. Furthermore, the proposed method was found to be computationally more efficient.