Investigation on the wall function implementation for the prediction of ship resistance

Abstract

A computational fluid dynamics (CFD) code, dubbed SNUFOAM, was developed to predict the performance of ship resistance using a CFD tool kit with open source libraries. SNUFOAM is based on a pressure-based cell-centered finite volume method and includes a turbulence model with wall functions. The mesh sensitivity, such as the skewness and aspect ratio, was evaluated for the convergence. Two wall functions were tested to solve the turbulent flow around a ship, and the one without the assumption of the equilibrium state between turbulent production and dissipation in the log law layer was selected. The turbulent flow around a ship simulated using SNUFOAM was compared to that by a commercial CFD code, FLUENT. SNUFOAM showed the nearly same results as FLUENT and proved to be an alternative to commercial CFD codes for the prediction of ship resistance performance.