Conference of Global Chinese Scholars on Hydrodynamics
APPLICATION OF CFD IN SHIP ENGINEERING DESIGN PRACTICE
AND SHIP HYDRODYNAMICS
ZHANG Zhi-rong1, LIU Hui2, ZHU Song-ping3, ZHAO Feng1
1
China Ship Scientific Research Center, Wuxi 214082, China
2
China Shipbuilding Industry Corporation, Beijing 100085, China
3
School of Maths. & Applied Stats., University of Wollongong, NSW 2522, Australia
ABSTRACT: Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) has
progressed rapidly in the past fifty years. It has been used in
many industrial fields and plays an irreplaceable role in
engineering design and scientific research. However, due to the
existence of free surface and complex ship geometry. Ship CFD
has fallen behind its counterparts in other industrial fields. But
with the recent breakthrough in ship CFD technology, practical
applications of CFD in analyzing and predicting ship
performance now become possible. In this paper, we shall
present some of our recent study in the numerical simulation of
wake wave pattern and the resistance of a surface ship. Some
progress on the wake simulation of a fully appended ship is
also discussed. Through our work, the huge potential of CFD
application in ship hydrodynamics performance prediction is
demonstrated.
KEY WORDS: computational fluid dynamics (CFD), ship
hydrodynamics, free surface, appendage
1. Introduction
Since 1960s, Computational Fluid Dynamics
(CFD) has made remarkable progress. The main
impetus to this progress is the increasing industrial
demands. In traditional design methods, lots of model
tests are required and thus it is costly and time
consuming. So engineers turn to advanced numerical
tools in aid of their engineering design. However, in
ship industry, due to the existence of free surface and
complex ship geometry, ship CFD has fallen behind
the other industrial fields. But with the recent
breakthrough in ship CFD technology, practical
applications of CFD in analyzing and predicting ship
performance now become possible.
Despite the advance of Experimental Fluid
Dynamics (EFD), the demand to know the detailed
flow field with better resolution and near-wall flow
information associated with the motion of a ship is
beyond what the current experimental technology can
offer. On the other hand, CFD techniques are good in
* Biography: ZHANG Zhi-rong (1966-), Male, Ph.D.
providing comprehensive flow field information.
Therefore they provide insight into the local flow
characteristics that may often enable a ship designer to
work out or improve his/her design. As the cost and
time required for the computation are much lower than
that of model tests. CFD has been more and more
involved in applied ship research and ship design. It
has been used already in practical ship design for
predicting the viscous flow around the hull, flow
separations, viscous resistance, wake field, appendage
alignment, propeller/hull interaction etc. CFD and
EFD will soon become two parallel ways,
complementing each other, for ship hydrodynamics
performance prediction.
Viscous flow computation for ship hull began in
1960s with the simplified boundary layer equation
being solved. In this early approach, the boundary
layer over most of the hull can be satisfactorily
calculated within required engineering accuracy.
However, this approach failed in predicting flow at
stern and into the wake. This prompted the researchers
to go for more advanced method. During the 1980s a
large number of RANS (Reynolds Averaged
Navier-Stokes Solver) method was developed for ship
stern flow. Later, the stern flow prediction was
improved rather remarkably around 1990. However,
CFD simulations near the propeller were less
satisfactory due to inaccurate prediction of the bilge
vortex and resultant characteristic “hook” shape in the
boundary layer. Later it was realized that the reason
for the inability to predict the wake hook was the
inadequate modeling of turbulence. So quite a lot of
effort was spent on finding an appropriate turbulence
model for ship stern flow in the next few years and
this had led to the adoption of more advanced models,
such as the k-ωturbulence model and the Reynolds
stress model. At the 1994 Tokyo CFD workshop, some
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very good predictions of the wake contours for surface
ship was presented. And also at this meeting viscous
flow prediction with free surface was focus of
discussion. In the next few years a variety of methods
were developed for computation of the free surface for
surface ship. By the time when the CFD workshop
2000 was held in Gothenburg, the free surface RANS
solvers had been remarkably improved. Although
waves away from the hull were not yet computed with
acceptable accuracy, those close to the hull were well
predicted. In CFDWS 2005, several modern hull
forms were introduced as test cases, including
self-propulsion. Having experienced more then 50
years of development, the ship CFD has now made
significant development in many aspects such as free
surface modeling, ship wake simulation and propeller
hull interaction.
In this paper, we shall present some recent
computational results of a RANS model for viscous
free surface flow along S60 ship hull at different
Froude numbers and wake flow of a complex surface
ship with various appendages. Through comparing
these results with relevant experimental data, we aim
at demonstrating that CFD can be a complement tool
to towing tank tests in ship engineering design
practice.
2. Numerical Methods
Three-dimensional RANS equations are the
governing equations in our study and they are solved
numerically. The numerical solution is worked out
through adopting a cell-centered finite volume method,
which is based on linear reconstruction scheme that
allows the use of computational elements with
arbitrary polyhedral topology. Convection term is
discretized using second order upwind scheme. The
velocity-pressure coupling is based on the SIMPLE
algorithm. The discretized algebraic equations are
then solved using the pointwise Gauss-Seidel iterative
algorithm, and algebraic multigrid (AMG) method is
employed to accelerate the solution convergence.
For the treatment of free surface in RANS
computations, two basic approaches are available. The
computational grid may be adapted to the free surface
and follow the movement of the free surface during
the computation (free-surface fitting); or a fixed
computational mesh is used and the position of the
free surface in that mesh is tracked (free-surface
capturing). Surface fitting is simpler to formulate and
gives a sharp boundary between water and air, but is
very demanding on the automatic grid adaptation if
large motions or breaking waves occur. On the other
hand, a new variable is introduced and a
corresponding transport equation needs to be set up,
in surface capturing methods, to track the free surface.
The airflow above the water surface is often
computed as well, to simplify the formulation. Special
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numerical techniques have to be used to keep the
air-water interface stable. In principle the latter
approach is suitable to compute breaking waves, air
trapping and other cases where the free-surface
experiences sharp topological changes.
One of the well-known surface capturing
approaches is ‘volume-of fluid’ (VOF) method. Hirt
and Nichols (1981) proposed the ‘volume of fluid’
function to deal with free surface boundary problems.
Being superior to most moving grid methods, the
VOF method is characterized by its great capability of
dealing with highly non-linear free-surface problems,
such as wave breaking and overturning, in which the
free-surface experiences sharp topological changes.
Because of its simplicity and flexibility in grid
generation, the VOF method is also a preferred
approach in computing ship waves.
The VOF model is a fixed grid technique
designed for two or more immiscible fluids where the
position of the interface between the fluids is part of
the unknown to be found through the solution
procedure. In the VOF model, the fluids share a single
set of momentum equations, and the volume fraction
of each of the fluids in each computational cell is
tracked throughout the domain.
If the mth liquid's volume fraction in the cell is
denoted as α m , then the following three conditions are
possible:
α m ＝0 , the cell is empty (of the mth liquid)
α m ＝1, the cell is full (of the mth liquid)
0< α m <1, the cell contains liquid interface
In VOF method, α m is also used to determine
the location of interface. The normal direction of the
interface lies in the direction in which the value of
α m changes most rapidly. The tracking of the
interface is accomplished by solving the continuity
equation of the volume fraction. For the mth liquid,
this equation has the form:
∂α m ∂α m
+ ui =0
∂t ∂xi
(1)
There is a constraint
n
∑α
m =1
m =1 (2)
that has to be imposed so that the total volume of the
fluid is a constant for the impressibility assumption to
be satisfied. In the equation (2), n is the total number
of liquids under consideration.
The density of the whole fluid in each cell is evaluated
by volume-fraction-average of all liquids in the cell:
 ρ = ∑α m ρ m (3)
All other properties (e.g., viscosity μ) are computed
in the same way.
A single momentum equation is solved
throughout the domain, and the resulting velocity field
is shared among the liquids. The momentum equation,
shown below, is dependent on the volume fractions of
all liquids through the properties ρ and μ.
∂ ∂ ∂P
ρu j + ρu i u j = −
∂t ∂xi ∂x j
∂u i ∂u j
+ μ( + ) + ρg i + F j (4)
∂x j ∂xi
The Shear-Stress Transport (SST) k -ωturbulence
model is adopted to calculate eddy viscosity in our
study. This model is believed to be one of the best
choices to simulate turbulence flow around ship hull
[Larsson (2000)]. The details of the model
formulation can be seen in [Menter (1994)].
3. Numerical Prediction and Validation of
waveform and Resistance of a Surface Ship
In recent years, computation of viscous flow with
free-surface effect becomes one of the important
subjects in the field of ship hydrodynamics. It has
been a challenging research task for years. The
presence of free surface makes it more difficult than
other flow calculation because the shape and location
of free surface is unknown in prior and it’s a part of
the solution.
Using VOF algorithm, the free surface ship flow
around model 5415 and Wigley hulls have been
numerically simulation successfully in CSSRC (China
Ship Scientific Research Center) [Gao (2002), Zhang
(2002) and Zhao (2005)].
One of the aims of CFD technique in ship
hydrodynamics is to act as an efficient supplementary
tool to costly model tests. Ship CFD, under the
framework of solving RANS equations for viscous
flow has made a lot of progress in recent years.
However, it lacks further case studies in the parameter
space. Therefore, to make the new ship CFD method
based on solving RANS equations more versatile like
laboratory model tests, we have carried out such
studies in this paper.
On the basis of the verification of our RANS
method for calculating viscous free surface flow past
simple Wigley hull and practical Model 5415, we now
apply the method to simulate the drag and ship
generated waves of a surface ship model with varying
Froude numbers. To the authors’ best knowledge, few
papers could be found in the literature on the
hydrodynamic performance of a surface ship with
varying Froude numbers by solving RANS equation.
With ample data available for the comparison
purpose, S60 (Series 60, CB = 0.6) hull, which was
taken as a benchmark test hull by ITTC to study wave
pattern and resistance of surface ship, is chosen as the
sample. In the past twenty years, many papers have
been published concerning numerical simulation or
experimental study on S60 hull.
The flow field around S60 for various Froude
numbers was numerically simulated by Garofallidis
[Garofallidis (1996)] in 1996. Limited by the com-
putational condition at that time, a composite method
was adopted. The domain of computation was divided
into two regions. The RANS method was only applied
in near hull region, while the classical Hess & Smith
method was used in the far field. The boundary of the
free surface was set by measured data in the towing
tank.
The main task of this section is the numerical
experiment on the viscous free surface flow field and
corresponding resistances of S60 hull at varying
Froude numbers. The geometric configuration of S60
hull is less complicated than that of Model 5415. The
length of hull is 3.048m, the same as that in
[Garofallidis (1996)]. Viscous flow field around S60
hull at nine different Froude numbers, ranging from
0.16 to 0.35, are calculated on a fixed computational
grids. The total number of cells is 216,600.
The simulated wave-elevation contours on
various Froude numbers, 0.16, 0.20, 0.24, 0.28, 0.30
and 0.316, are shown in figure 1. Equal interval
between adjacent contours is taken for all different
Froude number cases in the figure. It can be seen that
the free surface is rather flat at small Froude numbers.
Few waves appear in the case of Fn = 0.16.
Correspondingly, the wave resistance at small Froude
numbers, included in residuary resistance component,
is also rather small as shown in Table 1. Among the
above Froude numbers, the case of Fn = 0.316 is the
nominal state of S60 ship, which has comparable
experiment data and numerical results from other
simulations. Figure 2 shows the wave elevation
contours presented by [Windt (2000)]. While the
upper part of the figure is the result from the potential
flow theory, the lower part is the experimental data.
Compared qualitatively with these results in [Windt
(2000)], once again, it indicates a creditable simu-
lation of our method.
The wave profile along the hull with varying
Froude number is very useful to study the wave
resistance. Figure 3 shows the simulated results of the
wave profiles along S60 hull at different Froude
numbers. For five sets of Froude numbers, there are
experimental data available to us and we only choose
two of them to be plotted on the same graph as
examples for clarity reasons. These two different sets
of marker in the figure are the experimental data
[Garofallidis (1996)] at Fn = 0.20 and 0.35
respectively. Excellent quantitative agreement is
317
achieved at these two Froude numbers. It can be seen Table 1.
that the wave profile near the bow is a trough at Fn =
0.16, while it becomes wave crests with the Froude
number increasing to 0.20 and above. When Froude
number changes, the wave profiles are similar in form
while the wavelength and amplitude varying. The
amplitudes of the second crest are almost the same in
the Froude number nearby 0.3. It goes to very small at
Fn = 0.35.
Fig. 2 Wave levation contours of measurement and
computation [Windt (2000)]

(a) Fn=0.316

(b) Fn=0.30
Fig.3 Wave profile along model S60 hull

Table 1 The computed resistant coefficients at different

Froude numbers for S60
Fn Ct×103 Cf×103 Cr×103
(c) Fn=0.28
0.20 4.275 3.862 0.413

0.22 4.290 3.790 0.500

0.24 4.326 3.727 0.599

(d) Fn=0.24
0.26 4.547 3.670 0.877

0.28 4.965 3.626 1.339

0.30 5.307 3.571 1.736

0.316 5.377 3.536 1.841

(e) Fn=0.20
0.35 5.686 3.469 2.217

Traditionally, the result of model resistance test

(f) Fn=0.16
Fig. 1 Wave contours for S60 hull at different Froude number
The calculation of wave resistance with varying
Froude number is another important aspect. The
computational results of the resistance coefficients of
S60 hull at different Froude Numbers are tabulated in
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can be expressed as a corresponding relation between
resistance coefficient and Froude number in a
dimensionless way. The total resistance coefficient is
generally divided into two parts, frictional and
residuary resistance coefficient. The frictional
resistance coefficient is obviously a function of
Reynolds number for viscous effect, whereas the
residuary resistance coefficient almost has no
correlation to Reynolds number. As a crucial
resistance component of a surface ship, the wave
resistance is included in the residuary resistance.
Therefore, the relationship between the residuary
resistance coefficient and Froude number can be used
to evaluate the so-called “wave performance” of a
surface ship.
To investigate the scale effect on ship model drag
test, China Ship Scientific Research Center (CSSRC)
conducted a special test on four different scaled
models of S60. The lengths of the scaled models are
1.83, 2.542, 4.067 and 6.100 meters, respectively. The
resistance test on the largest model was repeated for
three times. Six groups of experimental data can be
found in the CSSRC report [Jiang (1993)]. Due to
different dimensions of the models used in the tests,
the comparison of the total resistance of different
models makes no sense. The residuary resistance
coefficient, however, can be used to verify our
calculation.
Fig. 4 The residuary resistance coefficient with varying Froude
number of S60 hull
Figure 4 shows the comparison between the
calculated residuary resistance coefficients with the
experimental data [Jiang (1993)]. All the six groups’
measurements are marked in the figure, together with
the numerical results obtained from the current model
and plotted in a bold line. It clearly demonstrated that
the overall variation of the residuary resistance
coefficient vs. Froude number has been successfully
captured. The simulated residuary resistance
coefficient is well consistent with the measurements.
Likewise, the computed curve also has two inflexions
near Fn = 0.25 and 0.30. Remarkable accuracy of the
computation is achieved at the range of lesser Froude
number from 0.20 to 0.28, and the difference from the
measurements increases a little when Froude number
is above 0.28. One of the main reasons for this
apparent under-estimate when the Froude number
goes beyond 0.28 is that a higher grid resolution is
required once the Reynolds number becomes larger.
The reason that the Reynolds number also changes
with the Froude number is because once we have
fixed the dimension of the computational hull,
Reynolds number goes up with the increase of Froude
number when the viscosity is a constant. On the other
hand, only one fixed grid resolution was adopted in
our study due to limited computational resources.
4. Wake Simulation and Validation for a Surface
Ship with Complex Appendages
A typical surface ship hull usually has complex
curvature, and may be equipped with a number of
appendages. Most commercial ships such as oil
tankers or container ships, only have few appendages,
while combatants usually have quite a number of
appendages. The capability of a CFD package to
accurately simulate the wake field of surface ship with
complex appendages is very important for the
practical application of CFD to ship design.
There have been few simulations for wake field
of complex naval combatant. It is even more
challenging for a CFD simulation of fully appended
surface ships. As rapid improvements occur in CFD
technology and turbulence modeling, numerical
simulations of flow field around fully appended
surface ship now become possible. Burg et al. (2002)
calculated the flow field of fully appended DTMB
5415 including rotating propeller using unstructured
grid. Bull et al. (2002) presented some numerical
results of flow field around a fully appended surface
ship and the comparisons with test data. Joseph et al.
(2004) investigated the propeller inflow for two naval
combatants with appendages with a model based on
the RANS equations. With good grids and appropriate
resolution, the RANS calculations provide very useful
information on the underlying physics of the flow and
scale effects.
The hull form chosen for the present study is a
typical combatant equipped with a complete set of
appendages, i.e. a sonar dome, anti-rolling fins, bilge
keels, strut and shaft.
For a ship hull with appendages, the grid
generation is not trivial. Usually, the hull topology is
complex with the presence of several appendages such
as skegs, struts, bilge keels, bulbous bows, etc. As a
result, simple structured grid is not always possible to
accommodate the need of simulating entire flow field
around a ship with several appendages. Furthermore,
with appendages it becomes much more difficult to
ensure grid not to be too skewed, while maintaining a
decent resolution in the regions of high gradients of
flow variables.
Due to its flexibility of handling complex
geometry, CFD methods based on unstructured grid
would much better suit hulls with appendages.
However, dealing with the boundary conditions is far
from satisfactory among these methods. In addition,
the number of grid points needed for properly
resolving the flow field is much large.
Multi-block structured grids were used in our
calculation. The grids were grouped in blocks in order
319
to deal with the complex topology of the ship
geometry. Such complexity is manifested in Figure 5,
which displays the grid topology around various
appendages. Because of symmetry, only half of the
domain is needed in the calculation. The computation
domain was divided into 59 blocks. The total number
of grid is 691,109. The numerical grid was generated
using commercial code GAMBIT. It must be
emphasized that the generation of computation grid
for such complicated geometries remain a difficult and
time-consuming exercise.
320
Fig.5 Grid topology around the appendages
As stated before, one of the most valuable results
of using CFD is to simulate the wake flow in the
propeller plane, especially to give circumferential
distribution of three components of the velocity, as
this information forms a crucial part of the input
conditions to propeller designers. This is indeed one
of the foci of this study. Our calculation for the
present study was carried on a model with the model
length being 6.4 m and the upstream velocity being
3.3 m/s, the Reynolds Number being 2.1×107, based
on ship length.
We have compared our predicted flow field in
propeller plane with towing tank test data [Liu (2001)].
Shown in Fig. 6 ~ Fig. 8. are the circumferential
distribution of axial velocity, tangential velocity and
radial velocity components respectively, at various
radial locations in the propeller plane. It can be seen
that all the three components of the computed
velocities overall agree very well with experimental
Fig. 6 Circumferential distribution of axial velocity at
various radial locations
results. The only noticeable slightly large difference
lies in the range of 300 degrees to 360 degrees in Fig.
6 and Fig. 8. This is the top-right region of the
propeller, if one faces in the direction the ship is
traveling because the azimuthal angels in these figures
are measured with the zeroth degree at 12-clock
position and an anti-clockwise rotation. Slightly larger
errors in this region are usually expected as the
presence of the V-shape double-armed struts in front
of the propeller that normally makes the flow in this
region much harder to simulate, especially to the
top-right region of the propeller. We believe that larger
errors in the top-right region of the propeller (between
300 degrees to 360 degrees) than those on the top-left
region (0 degrees to 60 degrees) displayed in Fig.
6-Fig. 8 are a result of the former region being closer
to the vertical symmetrical plane, on which the
symmetry boundary conditions have been applied
(There are two propellers for this ship, symmetrically
located on both sides of the symmetry plane).
Fig. 7 Circumferential distribution of tangential velocity
at various radial locations
One should also notice that the tangential and
radial velocity components, shown in Fig.7 and Fig. 8
respectively, are one order smaller than the axial
velocity component shown in Fig. 6. Thus, naturally it
is harder to achieve the same order of accuracy as that
of the axial component with the same resolution of the
computational grid. Considering that the calculation of
wake flow around propeller is a well-recognized
difficulty in computational ship hydrodynamics, it is
certainly quite encouraging to obtain such a good
result in all three components of the wake of an
appended hull. The comparison has demonstrated that
our CFD model is capable of simulating the steady
viscous flow around an appended ship hull with
acceptable accuracy.
Fig. 8 Circumferential distribution of radial velocity at
various radial locations
5. Conclusions
Computational results of a RANS model for
viscous free surface flow along S60 ship hull at
different Froude numbers and wake flow of a complex
surface ship with various appendages are presented in
this paper together with a comparison of these results
with experimental data. Good agreement with the
experimental data has been observed. This study has
further demonstrated the huge potential of CFD
applications in ship hydrodynamics as well as in ship
engineering design practice. CFD will be an
irreplaceable tool in computer-aided propeller and
ship designs.
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