Numerical prediction of ventilated planing flat plates for the design of Air Cavity Ships
In recent years, a great world issue is the respect for the environment. Each researcher, in his competence field, proposes new technologies and new approaches in order to reduce the environmental impact of a product or of an industrial process. In the naval field, the main way in order to reduce the environmental impact of the ship during the navigation is the reduction of the drag resistance and so the reduction of requested power. There are many ways in order to obtain a reduction of drag. This paper investigates, with a preliminary numerical study by means of Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD), the Air Cavity Ships technology (ACS). A first part of the paper concerns the study of the ri…
A preliminary method for the numerical prediction of the behavior of air bubbles in the design of Air Cavity Ships
Air-cavity ships (ACS) are advanced marine vehicles that use air injection under hull to improve the vessel’s hydrodynamic characteristics. Although the concept of drag reduction by supplying gas under the ship’s bottom was proposed in the 19th century by Froude and Laval, at this time there are not many systematic studies on this subject. This paper is a preliminary work with the purpose of being a basic tool for the design of the ACS with computational fluid dynamic methods. The study aims to conduct a series of computational tests to compare the numerical models of bubble with experimental data. The first step of this study was to investigate the behavior of free bubble in water, conside…
Fluid–structure interaction of downwind sails: a new computational method
The spreading of high computational resources at very low costs led, over the years, to develop new numerical approaches to simulate the fluid surrounding a sail and to investigate the fluidâstructure interaction. Most methods have concentrated on upwind sails, due to the difficulty of implementing downwind sailing configurations that present, usually, the problem of massive flow separation and large displacements of the sail under wind load. For these reasons, the problem of simulating the fluidâstructure interaction (FSI) on downwind sails is still subject of intensive investigation. In this paper, a new weak coupled procedure between a RANS solver and a FEM one has been implemented t…