Mid-fidelity NATO generic destroyer static and moving-ship airwake simulations using the Lattice-Boltzmann method compared with experimental data

Abstract

During rotorcraft ship-deck landing operations, complex interactional aerodynamic phenomena occur between the rotor and ship airwakes which are not fully understood. To aid in ship–rotorcraft interactional investigations, efficient mid-fidelity ship airwake solutions are needed. Additionally, the effects of ship motion have not been explored much. In this study, the NATO Generic Destroyer, a shared, representative ship geometry created for collaborative studies, was investigated numerically using a GPU-accelerated Lattice-Boltzmann Method solver, and the ship airwake results compared with wind tunnel measurements using discrete velocity probes on the landing deck. The ship surface was modeled using a robust Grad immersed boundary approach, and ship motion was thereby included in the simulations. Ship airwake results showed good agreement with the experiment and excellent computational performance. Simulations took under four hours to run on a single GPU node. This is several orders of magnitude improvement over traditional Delayed Detached-Eddy Simulations typically used to solve this problem, which may take days or weeks on CPU-based HPC clusters.