The Numerical Simulation of Ship Waves Using Cartesian Grid Methods with Adaptive Mesh Refinement

Abstract: Cartesian-grid methods with Adaptive Mesh Refinement (AMR) are ideally suited for simulating the breaking of waves, the formation of spray, and the entrainment of air around ships. As a result of the cartesian-grid formulation, minimal input is required to describe the ships geometry. A surface panelization of the ship hull is used as input to automatically generate a three-dimensional model. No three-dimensional gridding is required. The AMR portion of the numerical algorithm automatically clusters grid points near the ship in regions where wave breaking, spray formation, and air entrainment occur. Away from the ship, where the flow is less turbulent, the mesh is coarser. The numerical computations are implemented using parallel algorithms. Together, the ease of input and usage, the ability to resolve complex free-surface phenomena, and the speed of the numerical algorithms provide a robust capability for simulating the free-surface disturbances near a ship. Here, numerical predictions, with and without AMR, are compared to experimental measurements of ships moving with constant forward speed, including a vertical strut, the DDG 5415, and a wedge-like geometry.