It is important to include the contribution of the slamming-induced response in the structural design of large vessels with a significant bow flare. At the same time it is a challenge to develop rational tools to determine the slamming-induced loads and the prediction of their occurrence. Today it is normal practice to apply a standard sea-keeping procedure to determine the relative velocity distribution between the water surface and the hull and then to estimate the bottom slamming loads and the bow-flare slamming loads based on two-dimensional formulations similarly to water-entry problems. The pressure distribution as well as the total force is then determined by integration over a pseudo-threedimensional presentation of the hull geometry.In this paper the evaluation of the slamming load is taken one step further by performing direct three-dimensional, fully non-linear numerical calculations in a realistic wave environment.Both the global and the local slamming loads are assessed numerically using a finite-volume formulation with the free surface captured by a volume-of-fluid technique. This numerical procedure is justified by comprehensive validation studies where numerically evaluated slamming pressures are compared with experimentally measured results.To obtain an insight into the three-dimensional flow effects the next step is to apply the validated numerical procedure to evaluate and compare the accuracy and performance of the traditionally used two-dimensional formulations by a comparison with three-dimensional numerical formulations for a fine-form Panamax container ship bow hitting a flat water surface at a constant trim angle.Finally, the slamming evaluation is carried out on the basis of a three-dimensional case study of the same container ship sailing in a head sea at half the service speed in a critical wave episode which is defined conditional on a given extreme response level of the hull girder bending moment.

The capability of wave generation and absorption in a viscous flow solver becomes important for achieving realistic simulations in naval and offshore fields. This study presents an efficient generation of nonlinear wave fields in the viscous flow solver by using a nonlinear potential solver called higher-order spectral method (HOS). The advantages of using a fully nonlinear potential solver for the generation of irregular waves are discussed. In particular, it is shown that the proposed method allows the CFD simulation to start at the time and over the space of interest, retrieved from the potential flow solution. The viscous flow solver is based on the open source library OpenFOAM. The potential solvers used to generate waves are the open source solvers HOS-Ocean and HOS-NWT (Numerical Wave Tank). Several simulation parameters in the CFD solver are investigated in the present study. A HOS wrapper program is newly developed to regenerate wave fields in the viscous flow solver. The wrapper program is validated with OpenFOAM for 2D and 3D regular and irregular waves using relaxation zones. Finally, the extreme waves corresponding to the 1000 year return period condition in the Gulf of Mexico are simulated with the viscous flow solver and the wave elevation is compared with the experiments.

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