Floating objects in water flow: which tools and how much effort ?
 

Dear CFD enthousiastics,

I am rather new to cfd and I want to simulate floating objects moving at the surface of some flowing water. Before I start the project, I would like to know which tools I could use and how much effort this project represents.

The project
There are 2 reservoirs. The main reservoir contains a water flow where objects of interest are floating. Some underwater levees and some obstacles at the surface are present. This reservoir has a constant falling outlet. There is a water pump that feeds a second reservoir that in turn feeds the main one through a basic spillway. I am interested in looking at the motion of floating objects in the main reservoir in steady state conditions.
I think that this log transport in a spillway simulated with Flow3D is something with approximately the same complexity compared to what I want to do.

Tools

So far I have a 3D model of the reservoirs made with Sketchup. openFOAM seems to be powerful enough. I think that I should look at a few tutorials from openFOAM (such as the Spillway and the Floating Object tutorials). I guess that finding the right solvers might be an important part.

I would prefer opensource tools, but I may have access to Solidworks too.

Questions
1) Can I do what I want with Sketchup and openFOAM ?
2) Does it require strong computational power ?
3) Would that require more than 2 weeks full time for a skilled engineer new to CFD ?

Thank you for your help
Tom