Numerical simulation of a planing vessel at high speed

Abstract

Planing vessels are applied widely in civil and military situations. Due to their high speed, the motion of planning vessels is complex. In order to predict the motion of planning vessels, it is important to analyze the hydrodynamic performance of planning vessels at high speeds. The computational fluid dynamic method (CFD) has been proposed to calculate hydrodynamic performance of planning vessels. However, in most traditional CFD approaches, model tests or empirical formulas are needed to obtain the running attitude of the planing vessels before calculation. This paper presents a new CFD method to calculate hydrodynamic forces of planing vessels. The numerical method was based on Reynolds-Averaged Navier-Stokes (RANS) equations. The volume of fluid (VOF) method and the six-degrees-of-freedom equation were applied. An effective process was introduced to solve the numerical divergence problem in numerical simulation. Compared with experimental results, numerical simulation results indicate that both the running attitude and hydrodynamic performance can be predicted well at high speeds.