Notional all-electric ship thermal simulation and visualization

Abstract

The impact of unpredicted or unplanned thermal disturbances on any future all-electric ship may well lead to unexpected and untimely failure of mechanical-electrical systems (e.g., power electronics, high power sensors, and pulsed weapons) to the detriment of the ship's combat mission. The high power, rapid transients, and harsh environment expected to be imposed on both the electrical and thermal systems may well be unique to this class of ship. In order to develop the thermal analysis, a comprehensive visualization tool to display the temperature and heat dissipation distributions in the entire ship has been developed. This tool includes a simplified physical model, which combines principles of classical thermodynamics and heat transfer, resulting in a system of three-dimensional differential equations which are discretized in space using a three-dimensional cell centered finite volume scheme. Therefore, the combination of the proposed simplified physical model with the adopted finite volume scheme for the numerical discretization of the differential equations is called a volume element model (VEM). In this work, a 3D simulation is performed in order to determine the temperature distribution inside the ship for six different operating conditions. Visit visualization tool is used to plot the results.