A Computational Investigation of the Effect of Geometric Parameters on the Discharge Rate of a Ship Opening

The purpose of the research was to find a relationship between the geometric characteristics of an opening on deck and the water discharge rate. This study is aimed at the stability of open deck ferries and fishing vessels. The effective parameters on the discharge rate are the beam, depth of the water collected on the deck, and the discharge gap height. In this study, CFD analyses for water discharge from a ship deck were conducted, and the commercial code FLUENT was used to conduct the simulations. A two dimensional unsteady 2nd order solver in time and space was used for the simulation. The two-phase free surface model was simulated by the Volume of Fluid (VOF) method. Using the water discharge, the instantaneous depth Froude number was calculated as a part of the non-dimensional simulation. The effect of geometric parameters on the water discharge rate was investigated by keeping two parameters fixed while changing the third parameter. For each parameter, three different values were evaluated and the comparisons of all the twenty seven possible combinations of the effective parameters were presented. Results were compared with the experimental results obtained earlier at UBC.