Simplified CFD modeling for bilge keel force and hull pressure distribution on a rotating cylinder

Abstract

A horizontal, circular cylinder fitted with one bilge keel is forced to rotate harmonically around its axis. The bilge keel load and hull pressure distribution are investigated. A fully submerged condition (infinite fluid), and three partly-submerged conditions are considered. A two-dimensional numerical study is performed, and the results are validated against recently published experimental data by van’t Veer et al. [30]. In addition, comparisons for mass and drag coefficients are also made with experimental data for plate in infinite fluid (Keulegan and Carpenter [8]), and wall-mounted plate (Sarpkaya and O’Keefe [9]) in oscillatory flow.A Navier–Stokes solver based on the Finite Volume Method is adopted for solving laminar flow of incompressible water. The free-surface condition is linearized by neglecting the nonlinear free-surface terms and the influence of viscous stresses in the free surface zone, while the body-boundary condition is exact. This simplified modeling of the problem required the mesh to be fine only around the bilge keels, leading to a total number of cells around N≃1×104, which reduced computational cost significantly.The influence of draft and amplitude of oscillations on the bilge keel force and hull pressure distribution are considered. The bilge keel force is presented in terms of non-dimensional drag and mass coefficients including higher harmonic components. The numerical results are also compared with the industry standard empirical method for calculation of roll damping proposed by Ikeda et al. [4]. In general, a good agreement between the results of the present numerical method and the experimental data is obtained and the differences with those predicted by the empirical method are addressed.