International Conference on Computational Methods in Marine Engineering MARINE 2007 E. Oate, J. Garca, P. Bergan and T.

Kvamsdal, (Eds) CIMNE, Barcelona, 2007

ACCURACY OF VISCOUS RESISTANCE COMPUTATIONS FOR SHIPS INCLUDING FREE SURFACE EFFECTS
A. VAN DER PLOEG AND H.C. RAVEN
MARIN

P.O. Box 29, 6700 AA Wageningen, Netherlands e-mail: a.v.d.ploeg@marin.nl

Key words: Ship Viscous Resistance Coefficients, Free Surface Effects. 1 INTRODUCTION The European 6th-framework project VIRTUE aims at advancing the use of CFD in ship design. Workpackage 1 of this project considers the prediction of steady flow around the hull, resistance and propulsion; the field in which the use of CFD is most widespread. Several CFD codes are able to predict the viscous flow and wake field accurately today. However, the predicted resistance and its components are often not so accurate. As results of the CFD Workshop Tokyo 2005 [1] and several other experiences show, in particular the viscous pressure resistance (Cvp) may vary a lot between different methods and often shows substantial grid dependence and large sensitivity to modelling and discretization details. In [4] it is shown that for double-body flow computations the implementation of the symmetry conditions at the still water plane indeed has a large effect on that resistance component. This is illustrated in Fig. 1 which shows the grid dependence of the viscous pressure resistance coefficient for the KVLCC2 case for Rn=2.1x107, with various formulations of the symmetry condition. We used two types of implementations for the
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Figure1: Grid dependence of viscous pressure resistance for KVLCC2 double body flow, for Rn=2.1 x 107 and Rn = 2.03 10 9 .

symmetry boundary conditions: a direct approach that discretizes directly the symmetry conditions themselves using 1st 3rd order discretization, indicated by O1 O3; and an indirect one (IND) that sets the normal velocity component zero and that solves the continuity equation and the momentum equations tangential to the symmetry plane for points in this plane, taking the symmetry conditions into account in the coefficients of the discretised equations. As Fig.1 shows, for the O2 formulation Cvp increases by 50% from fine to coarse grid, and its scale effect decreases by 50%. A drastic improvement of the numerical accuracy of Cvp is

Cp*1000

A. van der Ploeg and H.C. Raven

obtained in our RANS code by adopting the IND formulation, in which the resistance and scale effect estimate is much less sensitive to grid density. The present paper reports ongoing work in which similar studies are done for viscous flow computations including free-surface effects. The next section describes the method used. 2 IMPLEMENTATION OF THE BOUNDARY CONDITIONS The method used is PARNASSOS [2], a RANS solver developed and used by MARIN and IST, dedicated to the prediction of the steady viscous flow around ship hulls. To deal with free-surface effects the composite approach [5] is used in the present study. First the wave pattern is computed using the free-surface potential-flow code RAPID [3]; then the viscous flow is computed in the fixed domain bounded by that wave surface. This includes wave effects on the viscous flow and wake field, but not the viscous effects on the wave pattern. We will study the grid dependence of the resistance prediction from this composite approach, and how it depends on the precise formulation of the boundary conditions at the wave surface. Resistance predictions from a true RANS/FS approach will be addressed in a subsequent study. We assume that the free surface has constant girthwise coordinate (indicated by ). The first two boundary conditions require that no shear stress is exerted on the water surface. Together with the definition of the virtual points above the free surface, which makes the grid locally orthogonal to the free surface, these reduce to the requirement that the -derivatives of the tangential velocity components are zero. The third boundary condition is that the normal component is zero. As a 4th boundary condition, which is required in order to close the system, we usually use the momentum equation in -direction. The pressure derivative in the -momentum equation is discretised with a third-order scheme with a downward bias. This is different from the usual implementation for double body, where an upward bias is used. We have used two different implementations: the direct method, with second-order accurate, direct discretization of the first two boundary conditions, using three-point downward schemes, and the equivalent of the IND-approach for double body. In the latter approach, the -momentum equation on the free surface is replaced by the momentum equation in wall-normal direction.
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Figure 2: Grid dependence of pressure resistance and frictional resistance for KVLCC2, for Rn=4.6 x 106. Composite approach. Note the difference in scale between both figures.

A. van der Ploeg and H.C. Raven

3 RESULTS FOR THE KVLCC2 For the KVLCC2 at Re = 4.6 106 , Fn = 0.142 we study the grid dependence of the resistance for the implementations of the boundary conditions described above. The inflow plane is 0.5Lpp in front of the bow, the outflow plane 1.5Lpp aft of the stern. To reduce the computational effort, the external boundary is relatively close to the ship, at about 0.15Lpp distance; this causes Cvp to be too low [6], but by comparing several grid densities for the same domain, the grid dependency can still be studied. Five grid densities have been used, with grid refinement applied in all 3 directions. The densest grid is here 632 140 56 = 5M cells and is roughly equally-spaced in streamwise and transverse direction. In the composite approach, the wave surface is fixed and the kinematic free-surface condition is imposed there; but the dynamic condition is not; so the resulting pressure at the wave surface may differ from atmospheric pressure. In practice, small differences occur for stern waves, due to the neglect of viscous effects in the wave pattern computation, and along the waterline due to discretisation errors. The value for Cvp, which now includes both the viscous pressure resistance and wave resistance, is obtained by integrating the pressure over the hull up to the prescribed waterline, but if the total pressure p is not zero there, a correction z = p/g is required, which leads to corrections in the pressure- and viscous resistance: g 2 R p = nx pdyn dS + nx z gzdS z dy and R f = x dS WL z x ds 2 WL s s S For this case, Rp is about 4.5% of Cvp; and Rf is negligible: about 0.2% of Cvf. Fig. 2 shows that the grid-dependence in both Cvp and Cvf is very small. Contrary to the earlier findings for double-body flow, the Cvp values from the IND-formulation have no better grid-independence, and they differ considerably from those of the direct approach. Fig. 3 shows that this difference stems from the stern area near the waterline. A further inspection of the isobars below the water surface shows that with the IND-approach, the coupling between the pressures on the water surface and below is not good enough. As mentioned above, the computed Cvp in the grid dependence study are too small because the domain is too narrow. Therefore, we also computed the resistance in a domain with exterior boundary sufficiently far from the ship, at 1.0Lpp. The resulting Cvp for the direct implementation of BCs is 0.703 10-3. The corresponding Cvp from a double body computation is 0.604 10-3. The difference between these is the estimate for the wave resistance, which is very small: approximately 10-4, or 2.5% of the total model resistance! The correction Rp mentioned above, although small, is a significant part of this. A similar 9 -3 computation for full-scale, Rn = 2.03 10 , gives Cvp= 0.287 10 using the direct BC implementation. The corresponding value from a double body computation is 0.221 10-3. Hence the resulting value for the wave resistance is again very small: approximately 7 10-5. This scale effect on the wave resistance seems rather unlikely, and the predicted wave resistance is significantly smaller than what the potential-flow code predicts, notwithstanding the agreement of the hull pressure distribution (Fig. 3). The small differences in pressure on the forebody need further consideration in order to corroborate the predictions.

A. van der Ploeg and H.C. Raven

This illustrates how, in order to be able to predict the wave resistance for a low Froude number case, and its scale effect, extreme accuracy and full control of all minute details is needed. Ongoing research should yield further improvements.
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Figure 3: Computed hydrodynamic pressure on the hull with different methods.

4 CONCLUSIONS In our ongoing research on the accuracy of ship resistance predictions from our RANS solver, many small details of modelling and discretisation are checked. This paper addressed the implementation of boundary conditions at the wave surface in the composite approach. The standard direct implementation of these boundary conditions was found to lead to little grid dependence of the resistance, contrary to our findings for the double-body flow case. Computations show that both for model and full scale the estimated wave resistance is very small and the numerical accuracy is still insufficient to predict it for the present tanker case. REFERENCES
[1] Hino, T. (ed.) 2005, Proceedings of the CFD Workshop Tokyo 2005; Nat. Maritime Res. Inst. Japan. [2] Hoekstra, M. (1999), Numerical simulation of ship stern flows with a space-marching Navier-Stokes method. Ph.D.Thesis, Delft Univ. Techn. [3] Raven, H.C. (1996), A Solution Method for the Nonlinear Ship Wave Resistance Problem. Ph.D.Thesis, Delft Univ. Techn. [4] Raven, H.C., van der Ploeg, A.P. and and Ea, L. Extending the benefit of CFD tools in ship design and performance prediction , 7th Int. Conf. on Hydrodynamics, Ischia, October 2006. [5] Windt, J., and Raven, H.C., A composite procedure for ship viscous flow with free surface, 3rd Num. Towing Tank Symposium, Tjarno, Sweden, 2000. [6] Ea, L. and Hoekstra, M., On the Numerical Accuracy of the Prediction of Resistance Coefficients in the Ship Stern Flow Calculations, MARINE 2007, Barcelona

Acknowledgement
The present work has partly been carried out in the VIRTUE project, an Integrated Project in the 6th Framework Programme Sustainable development, global change and ecosystems under grant 516201 from the European Commission. This support is gratefully acknowledged.