Free Surface Viscous Flow Around a Ship Model

The present stage of viscous flow numerical analysis combined with computer technology latest advances made viable the mathematical treatment of many robust and complex engineering problems of practical interest. Some numerical problems which solutions would be just unthinkable not more than ten years ago may be now dealt with in a reliable and fairly accurate manner. A truly example of this kind of problem would be the calculation of hydrodynamic loads acting on yawing ships. The solution of such a problem raises practical interest due to applications, for instance, as in the case of stationary FPSO/FSO ships facing sea currents, commonly used in offshore deep-water oil production. In the present solution, the complete incompressible Navier–Stokes (N-S) equations are solved by means of an algorithm that applies the Beam and Warming [1] approximated factorization scheme to simulate the flow around a Wigley’s hull. The numerical code was implemented using Message Passage Interface (MPI) and can be run in a cluster with an arbitrary number of computers. The good agreement with other numerical and experimental data obtained from the literature and high efficiency of the algorithm indicated its potential to be used as an effective tool in ship design.