Several researchers around the world have developed ocean energy devices over the last three decades, such as fixed and floating offshore wind turbines and wave and tidal energy converters. Furthermore, experimental facilities designed to test such devices have become increasingly focused on the generation of multidirectional, realistic, waves. In particular, FloWave, located at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, is the first ocean energy research facility in the world to reproduce wave and current combinations to realise sea states that include severe design conditions in a multidirectional circular water tank. In this study, a numerical water tank model was developed for the FloWave multidirectional wave basin using a modified version of DualSPHysics on graphics processing units. The geometry includes 168 wave-maker paddles that were constructed using particles and treated as a solid phase. Rotation angle data was individually imposed on each paddle to generate monochromatic long-crested regular/irregular wave trains and a concentric wave singularity including wave absorption. Modeldetermined surface elevation results were in overall agreement with the experimental results; Several regular, irregular and concentric wave conditions were successfully reproduced in a multidirectional wave basin. The presented research represents the first reported reproduction of a multi-directional wave tank, and multi-directional waves, using particle based methods. To demonstrate future capability, the numerical model was also applied to a strong fluid-structure interaction between wave trains and an offshore wind turbine structure with six degrees of freedom as a further work. A study is ongoing to include flow generators with impellers to generate tidal currents and combinations of waves and currents as real sea state conditions. The spatial distributions of the flow field from the numerical model will be validated with coastal acoustic tomography (CAT) performed in the FloWave.
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