The Simulation of Ship Maneuvering Using a RANS-Based CFD Tool

Maneuverability is an important characteristic of a ship, which affects not only the performance during its daily operation but also its safety under urgent conditions, such as danger of collision. Currently, it draws increasing attention from naval architects during the design stage. The characteristics of hydrodynamic derivatives in maneuvering equations are traditionally obtained from towing tank experiments. In this paper, we present several numerical simulations of typical ship maneuvering using a RANS-based computational fluid dynamics tool. In order to resolve the transient phenomena properly, the explicit volume of fluid method is applied to solve the free surface. The motions of the vessel are captured through an embedded 6-DOF dynamic solver. This kind of simulation provides a more direct reference to naval architects for their design and optimization work. All simulations can be achieved with practical turnaround times on a single workstation.