An investigation on the wake flow of a generic ship using IDDES: The effect of computational parameters

Abstract

The study of the ship airwake is critical as it explores the effect of unsteady wake flow on helicopter operations. This paper studied the near-wake flow topology of a generic ship at Re = 8 × 104 to assess the capability of a hybrid RANS/LES (Reynolds-averaged Navier–Stokes/large-eddy simulation) approach, known as IDDES (improved delayed detached-eddy simulation). The impact of computational parameters, including the mesh grid, residual level, time-step size, momentum discretization scheme and transient formulation, on the wake flow was investigated. The numerical results were validated by using the previous experimental data and LES results. The results show that except of the mesh resolution all other computational parameters varied in the current study do not have significant effect on the global drag forces, but showing large differences on the prediction of the local wake flow structures. This point has not been evidently reported in the previous work. The finer grid resolution is sufficient to produce an accurate qualitative and quantitative prediction of the flow structures, while using a poor grid resolution (coarse mesh) leads to inaccurate prediction of the flow topology. The recommended parameters for the time-step size (7.5 × 10−5s) and residual level (1 × 10−4) provide sufficient accuracy of wake predictions, showing good agreement with reference studies. For the convective term of the momentum equation in IDDES, the bounded central differencing scheme is proposed for its discretization, while the bounded second-order implicit is proposed to be adopted as the transient formulation.