Numerical Simulation of the Dynamics of Modular Moored Keeled Breakwater Structures for the Shielding of Floating Photovoltaic Installations

Floating photovoltaic (FPV) systems are an increasingly attractive route to large-scale solar deployment on water bodies, but their structural integrity and energy yield are threatened by the wave environments to which they are exposed at nearshore and offshore sites. Floating breakwaters (FBWs), and keeled geometries in particular, are a candidate protection system. Here we develop a smoothed particle hydrodynamics (SPH) model of a moored, keeled floating breakwater using the open-source solver DUALSPHYSICS, with waves generated and absorbed through the relaxation-zone method [1,2]. The model is assessed against wave-basin experiments in two stages: a verification stage under regular waves spanning six height–period combinations, and an assessment stage under irregular sea states (two JONSWAP spectra and a broadband white-noise excitation). We report the wave transmission and reflection behaviour, the breakwater motions and their response amplitude operators (RAOs), and find that there is reasonable agreement in the SPH simulations at longer wave length conditions.