High-Fidelity Simulation and Novel Data Analysis of the Bubble Creation and Sound Generation Processes in Breaking Waves

Abstract

Recent increases in computing power have enabled the numerical simulation of many complex flow problems that are of practical and strategic interest for naval applications. A noticeable area of advancement is the computation of turbulent, two-phase flows resulting from wave breaking and other multiphase flow processes such as cavitation that can generate underwater sound and entrain bubbles in ship wakes, among other effects. Although advanced flow solvers are sophisticated and are capable of simulating high Reynolds number flows on large numbers of grid points, challenges in data analysis remain. Specifically, there is a critical need to transform highly resolved flow fields described on fine grids at discrete time steps into physically resolved features for which the flow dynamics can be understood and utilized in naval applications. This paper presents our recent efforts in this field. In previous works, we developed a novel algorithm to track bubbles in breaking wave simulations and to interpret their dynamical behavior over time (Gao et al., 2021a). We also discovered a new physical mechanism driving bubble production within breaking wave crests (Gao et al., 2021b) and developed a model to relate bubble behaviors to underwater sound generation (Gao et al., 2021c). In this work, we applied our bubble tracking algorithm to the breaking waves simulations and investigated the bubble trajectories, bubble creation mechanisms, and bubble acoustics based on our previous works.