Numerical Investigation of Flow Field Around a Ship in Manoeuvring Motion

Abstract

SummaryViscous flow simulation of flow field around ships for manoeuvrability prediction has become a highly sought after issue now-a-days among the ship hydrodynamicists. As potential flow theory still lacks the versatility to consider the viscosity and flow separation effects in calculation, RANS simulation has gained its popularity in calculating detailed pressure and shear force distributions around drifting ships. The objective of this research work is to investigate the patter of flow around a manoeuvring tanker. An in-house code using unstructured grid based RANS solver has been developed to investigate the behavior of a ship in drifting motion. For unstructured grid the oscillations caused by the adoption of second order differencing scheme have been minimized through the implementation of a slope limiter algorithm in discretizing the diffusion term of the Navier-Stokes equation. A double hull model has been implemented in the manoeuvring simulation instead of considering the free surface flow. This approximation is justified when the ship speed is considered to be quite low (Fr<0.2) during drifting motion.