The slender shape of a modern ship hull, exhibits a roll motion that is — in contrast to heave and pitch motion — submitted to large amplitudes and weak damping. This effect explains the importance of determining the roll damping of a hull and denotes the difficulty to measure such a small dynamic property.
For the joint research project Best-Roll a series of roll decay tests were conducted with the model of a post panamax container ship. To capture the influence of the draft and the ship velocity, the roll motion was measured for a systematic variation of these parameter. In addition the tests were performed with an initial roll angle of 20 degrees, in order to investigate the nonlinear damping behavior at large roll angles.
The objective of the subsequent study was to test the capability of OpenFOAM to compute the overall roll damping of a ship hull and appendages. For the numerical comparison, the roll decay test was simulated with OpenFOAM, using a transient multiphase solver with a RANS turbulence model, dynamic mesh motion and a rigid body motion model of the ship. The results were compared by calculating the roll damping coefficient for both experiment and numerical simulation by means of time series analysis of the roll angle.
