CFD research project findings presented

Damen’s two-year ‘Gone With The Wind’ (GWTW) project has involved looking at aerodynamics above the waterline as a separate analysis to those CFD studies that focus on the interactions that occur below the surface.

The research is addressing the challenge of meeting the requirements of the IMO regulation 749.18 for vessels to have sufficient transversal stability to resist over-rolling in severe side winds, said Marco Bovio, senior research hydromechanics engineer at Damen.

Validation

GWTW has two main elements. Damen has been developing the CFD methodology in partnership with Numeca while at the same time conducting the physical tests that are needed to validate and verify the CFD calculations, using a 1:18 scale model of Damen’s FCS 3307.

The model has been evaluated in a wind tunnel using various heading and heeling angles while the computational software has been configured to reproduce the conditions in the wind tunnel to a high degree of accuracy.

Simulations using the FCS 3307 were then run using two separate CFD mathematical models; URANS and DES, to determine their efficacy and compare them with the findings of the wind tunnel testing programme.

Wind tunnel reproduction

The CFD model has reproduced the wind tunnel experiment and tunnel apparatus to a high degree of accuracy across a range of simulated conditions and achieved good correlation for forces and moments at various heading and heeling angles.

Work is now underway to adapt this methodology to full-scale prediction.

Parallel activities are currently taking place to carry out the CFD validation of the hydrodynamic related part of the study.