Multi-scale Simulations of Flow in the Upper Open Area of a Luxury Cruise Ship

Abstract

Luxury cruise ships have complicated superstructures, which are greatly affected by wind loads. At present, the research on the external flow field of luxury cruise ships mainly adopts the method of directly calculating the whole ship model. Due to the limited computing resources, this method is difficult to accurately describe the local complex flow field structure. This paper proposes a multi-scale simulation method based on the entire ship model of the luxury cruise ship and the refined model of the superstructure. Firstly, the flow field around the cruise ship is obtained through the whole ship simulation, and the local flow field data is extracted; then the local flow field data is imported into the local refined model of the cruise ship as the speed entrance boundary condition; finally, the refined simulation analysis of the cruise ship is carried out. In this paper, a multi-scale simulation method is used to analyze the characteristics of the flow field around the superstructure of the cruise ship by combining pressure, flow velocity and vorticity. The results show that the local simulation can obtain a finer flow field structure than the whole ship simulation, and the result obtained by using multi-scale simulation is more accurate than the result obtained by directly using the natural wind speed profile velocity entrance. This article provides a new idea for wind field simulation of luxury cruise ships and other ship types with complex superstructures.