A Fluid Structure Interaction Method for Simulating the Behaviour of Fishing Nets
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Industrial fishing is carried out mainly by trawling gears, which consist of a bag-shaped net, towed by one or more boats, that captures the species that are in their path. Currently, the fishing industry faces two challenges: the improvement of its energy efficiency and the elimination of discards. The best way to face these challenges is to reduce the drag generated by the nets and improve their selectivity. Designing selective fishing gears is a very complex process, and nowadays it is mainly based on the expertise of fishermen and marine biologists, together with expensive tests in the open sea or in towing tanks. This is why computational tools have a prominent role to play in this task. Nets are flexible structures that deform easily due to the hydrodynamic forces they are subjected to, so their accurate simulation requires taking into the account the fluid-structure interaction. In this work, a one-way cosimulation tool is developed, based on a finite element triangular structural model and a novel surface porous model to simulate the net behaviour in a finite volume code.
