Computation of Free Surface Flows around Box-Shaped Ships by an Unstructured Navier-Stokes Solver

Abstract

A novel ship concept which is called ultra large block coefficient ship (ULBS) to enable efficient environmentconscious sea transportation is under investigation at Yokohama National University. Since ULBS is supposed to have a very blunt hull, flow field analysis around a ship is crucial for a design of hull forms with better hydrodynamic performance. Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) is expected to be an efficient design tool for unconventional hull forms such as ULBS. However, it is desirable to examine applicability of the CFD method before the actual design application. Thus, free-surface flow computations of two box-shaped ships which can be considered as the extreme cases of ULBS are carried out. Grid convergence study is performed with respect to resistance for the verification of the results. Total resistance coefficients are compared with each other and also with available experimental data. The pressure and velocity distributions of the two ships are compared with each other. The flow structures with large separations are observed and the influences of the box geometry to the flow fields are discussed.