Analysis of the Roll Decay Motion for a Patrol Boat by URANS Simulations

The simulations of the flow around a vessel of the Italian Navy in free roll decay have been carried out by the numerical solution of the Reynolds Averaged Navier-Stokes equations. The focus is on the analysis of the roll motion coefficients (damping and period of oscillations) at different Froude and Reynolds numbers. To this aim, numerical simulations were carried out at three different speeds, with corresponding Froude numbers equal to 0.160, 0.227 and 0.337, and Reynolds numbers ranging from 4.073 10⁶ to 1.300 10⁷ at model scale. Computations were carried out by means of an in-house unsteady RANS solver; the scheme is based on a finite volume discretization, and it is globally second order accurate. The free surface is handled by means of a suitable single phase level set algorithm; moreover, Chimera overlapping grid capabilities have been implemented in the code, which has been also efficiently parallelized. An analysis of the roll motion, longitudinal and lateral forces and roll moment is carried out for the different speeds considered. A preliminarily grid convergence analysis is also performed.