Evaluating the self-propulsion of a container ship in a seastate using computational fluid dynamics

An important area of ship design that requires the development of unsteady computational fluid dynamics is the ability to evaluate accurately the unsteady propulsive efficiency of a ship in waves. A reliable capability to do this would allow design selection of hull forms that have maximum propulsive efficiency across their required operating range of seastates. In this paper we consider the necessary steps in validating the assessment of wave and viscous hull resistance, the computational efficiency of representing the propulsion effects of a propeller and finally the influence of an incident wave on the overall propulsive forces. The Korean Container Ship, KCS, is chosen due to the availability of good quality experimental data and the relative magnitudes of the resistance components. Two different flow solvers are applied and a variety of meshing strategies. Overall, good predictions of the self-propelled ship condition are possible if an appropriate, flow feature adapted, mesh of sufficiently high density and quality is use