Floating body

As described in the Tutorial, a floating body is defined as a mesh with degrees of freedom and optionally other properties, such as a mass and a center of mass.

Initialization

The floating body is set up by initializing the FloatingBody class:

body = cpt.FloatingBody(mesh=mesh, dofs={})

The above example creates a new body without degrees of freedom.

Mesh

The mesh can be a Mesh object, or any of the variants defined in Capytaine, such as a ReflectionSymmetricMesh.

Lid mesh

For irregular frequencies removal, a second mesh can be provided when defining the body. It is meant to be a mesh of a lid of the part of the free surface that is inside the body. The lid can either on the free surface or slightly below. This mesh is ignored for many computations (such as hydrostatics) and is only used when solving a BEM problem.

It is set as in the following example:

body = cpt.FloatingBody(mesh=mesh, lid_mesh=lid_mesh)

where lid_mesh is a mesh object which can loaded in the same way as the main mesh (see Mesh initialization or using the specific methods of Extracting or generating a lid.

Once a lid mesh has been defined, it is automatically used for irregular frequencies removal without any other action from the user. The lid does not need neither to cover the whole interior free surface, nor to be connected with the hull mesh. (The lid automatically generated by generate_lid() typically does not.) Nonetheless, the more interior free surface is covered, the more efficiently the irregular frequencies will be removed.

For irregular frequencies removal, the lid is expected to have normals going down (towards the fluid, through the body). If the lid appears to be horizontal with normal going up, Capytaine will switch the direction of its normal vectors.

When working with symmetric meshes, the mesh and the lid_mesh should have the exact same symmetry. If so, the symmetry is used for the resolution. Otherwise, the symmetry is discarded and a full resolution is done.

Dofs

Degrees of freedoms are stored in a Python dictionary associating the name of each dof to the description of the corresponding motion or deformation.

For rigid bodies, the motion is encoded in an ad-hoc Python object of class TranslationDof or RotationDof. It is recommended to initialize them in the following way:

body = cpt.FloatingBody(
    mesh=mesh,
    dofs=cpt.rigid_body_dofs(rotation_center=(0, 0, -1)),
)

If no rotation_center is provided, \((0, 0, 0)\) is used as a default. The standard names used to refer to the rigid body dofs are:

print(body.dofs.keys())
# dict_keys(['Surge', 'Sway', 'Heave', 'Roll', 'Pitch', 'Yaw'])

If only some dofs are of interest, you can use the following syntax:

body = cpt.FloatingBody(
    mesh=mesh,
    dofs=cpt.rigid_body_dofs(only=["Heave"], rotation_center=(0, 0, -1))
)
print(body.dofs.keys())
# dict_keys(['Heave'])

Generalized degrees of freedom can be defined as a Numpy array of shape (nb_faces, 3). This array stores the displacement vector at the center of each face of the mesh:

body = cpt.FloatingBody(
        mesh=mesh,
        dofs={
            "heave-like": np.array([(0, 0, 1) for x, y, z in mesh.faces_centers]),
            "x-shear": np.array([(np.cos(np.pi*z/2), 0, 0) for x, y, z in mesh.faces_centers])
            },
        )

Defining a rigid-body-dof as a generalized dof (as in the example above for heave) does not make a difference for first-order hydrodynamics without forward speed. It makes a difference for the hydrostatic stiffness, when the generalized dofs are using a approximate formula, whereas exact values can be returned for rigid body dofs.

For multiple bodies, the dofs of the component bodies should transparently be defined for the compound body object. See also the section dedicated to multiple bodies.

Other parameters

Besides the mandatory mesh and dofs, a floating body can also be defined with a mass, given a floating point number and a center_of_mass, given a three coordinates. These two arguments are required for Hydrostatics but not for first-order wave-structure interaction. Their only role then is for the definition of the rotation degrees of freedom. When defining a rotation dof, the code looks for attributes called rotation_center, center_of_mass or geometric_center (in that order), and use them to define the rotation axis. If none of them are define, the rotation is defined around the origin of the domain \((0, 0, 0)\).

Finally, as the mesh objects, the floating body can be assigned a name.

Display and animation

The methods show() and show_matplotlib() of meshes can also be used on FloatingBody.

Geometric transformations

All the geometric transformation defined on meshes in Meshes can also be applied to FloatingBody. Beside updating the mesh, they also update the definition of the degrees of freedom and the center of mass (if relevant).