CFD Validation of a Container Ship in Calm Water and Head Seas

Added resistance of ships in waves is one of increasingly important problems in naval engineering due to energy efficiency regulations. In this work, validation of the Naval Hydro pack in OpenFOAM is performed by conducting simulations of a KRISO container ship (KCS) in calm water and head waves. Steady resistance and dynamic sinkage and trim at different Froude numbers are compared to experimental data. Mesh refinement study has been carried out for design Froude number in order to asses numerical uncertainty. Seakeeping simulations of the ship in head waves are carried out for a number of different wave parameters at design Froude number. Added resistance is compared with experimental results. All simulations are performed with fully non–linear, turbulent, two–phase CFD solver. Wave modelling is performed using Spectral Wave Explicit Navier–Stokes Equations (SWENSE) [1] with implicit relaxation zones [5] that are used to prevent wave reflection. In addition to the validation runs, 3-D freak wave simulation encountering a KCS has been performed using the SWENSE solver coupled with a directional Higher Order Spectrum (HOS) [2] method for nonlinear wave propagation.