Local flow assessment of the Japan Bulk Carrier using different turbulence models

Abstract Ship resistance and powering represent the most important aspects in the initial design stage of the ship. Based on their estimation the basic milestone for selecting the main engine and the propulsion system is established. The majority of ships in the international fleet nowadays rely on the screw propeller working in the wake zone behind the ship. The wake flow of the ship has a direct impact on the propeller performance and the propulsion efficiency. Accurate prediction of the nominal and effective wake is crucially important to provide a proper understanding of the flow where the propeller will perform. From this point of view, the wake flow of the Capesize Japan Bulk Carrier (JBC) is assessed using a viscous flow Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) method. Numerical simulations are performed to predict the nominal and effective wake of the ship by making use of the viscous flow solver ISIS_CFD of the FINETM/Marine software provided by NUMECA. The solver is based on the finite volume method to build the spatial discretization of the transport equation to resolve the Reynolds-Averaged Navier-Stokes (RANS) equations. Closure to turbulence is achieved using different turbulence models in order to investigate their accuracy in predicting the complex wake flow of the ship. Two-phase flow approach is used to model the air-water interface where the Volume of Fluid method is implemented to capture the free-surface. The results for both nominal and effective wake are assessed against the experimental data provided by the National Maritime Research Institute (NMRI) and Yokohama National University in Japan that were presented in the seventh Workshop on CFD in ship hydrodynamics (Tokyo2015). The results validation showed a reasonable agreement compared to the experimental data for both nominal and effective wake. As it was expected, some turbulence models showed to be more accurate in predicting ship wake, especially the Shear Stress Transport (K-ω SST) and Explicit Algebraic Reynolds Stress (EASM) Models. A special investigation of the flow vortices is also taken into consideration.