A CFD study of the behavior of a crew transfer vessel in head seas using OpenFOAM

Crew transfer vessels (CTV) were a fast means of transportation, providing inspection and maintenance services by transferring technicians from shore to offshore structures. These vessels had been designed to be efficient and effective at high speeds, though this means the ship motions were highly sensitive to the sea conditions. Accordingly, it was critical to be able to estimate a ship’s response among different wave conditions in the time domain. In this study, a Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) method was used for the analysis of Fluid-Structure interactions with a crew transfer vessel as a case study. The CFD codes were formulated to solve the unsteady Reynolds-Averaged Navier–Stokes equations using the finite-volume method with OpenFOAM, an open-source CFD software program. OpenFOAM offered high accuracy of ship motion predictions and high resolution of infield flow phenomena, taking into consideration both viscous and rotational effects in the flow and free surface waves. A comprehensive uncertainty analysis was presented, including verification and validation studies. The cases performed demonstrate that the results were found to be in good agreement with the available experimental results and showed the importance of a seakeeping analysis for such vessels