A numerical formulation for simulating free-surface hydrodynamics

Cartesian-grid methods in combination with immersed-body and volume-of-fluid methods are ideally suited for simulating breaking waves around ships. A surface pan-elization of the ship hull is used as input to impose body-boundary conditions on a three-dimensional cartesian grid. The volume-of-fluid portion of the numerical algo-rithm is used to capture the free-surface interface, includ-ing the breaking of waves. The numerical scheme is im-plemented on a parallel computer. Recent improvements to the numerical scheme are discussed, including imple-mentation of a new multigrid procedure and conversion to MPI communication. Numerical predictions are com-pared to laboratory measurements of a towed transom-stern model