Influence of interface-sharpening on the ship’s wave system

Abstract

This article investigates the influence of the interface-sharpening algorithm on the wave height near ships in flow simulations. The focus is on finite-volume-based flow simulations with the volume of fluid (VOF) method to account for the two phases, gaseous air and liquid water. A common approach to obtain a comparatively sharp interface between the water phase and the air phase is to use interface-capturing approaches combined with interface-sharpening schemes. The present work demonstrates that the interface-sharpening schemes can contain case-dependent parameters, and that the optimum values for these parameters may not be known a priori. Therefore, if the parameters are not set correctly, the wave height at some distance to the ship may be unrealistically small or large. To demonstrate this, flow simulations of calm-water resistance of the KCS ship are performed with different discretizations and different parameters of the interface-sharpening scheme. The present simulation results are compared to experimental results to provide recommendations on the optimum choice of interface-sharpening parameters and guidelines for performing such flow simulations, to improve predictions of the ship’s wave system.