(With link to paper) Marin has published a paper on CFD Simulations for the flow around a tug to improve performance prediction of new tug designs.
An important vessel for the operational process in a harbour is the tug, a vessel built for the specific purpose of quickly manoeuvring larger vessels in waterways. The key features of a tug are the towing and escorting performances under optimal conditions, which are often reached when sailing under drift at high Froude numbers. Potential users or buyers compare tugs on these key features. Thus, for tug designers, it is of significant importance to correctly predict the performance of new designs, therewith enabling themselves to verify possible improvements.
These predictions, based on lift and drag characteristics of the hull and appendages, are frequently performed using free running or captive model tests, which can be expensive, give no thorough insight in flow specifics and still suffer from scale effects even though large-scale models are used. An alternative approach is the use of viscous flow computations, also called Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD).
Marin Paper
Marin has published a paper that estimates the experimental uncertainties from captive model tests to obtain correct validation material. Thereafter a verification and validation exercise of free surface simulations with the KSKL turbulence model and a drift angle of 15 deg is presented. These are followed by a turbulence sensitivity study of the KSKL, SST, EARSM and DDES turbulence model and finally simulations at other drift angles with the KSKL turbulence.
The paper is available for download from the Marin website.
