Full-scale unsteady RANS CFD simulations of ship behaviour and performance in head seas due to slow steaming

It is critical to be able to estimate a ship's response to waves, since the resulting added resistance and loss of speed may cause delays or course alterations, with consequent financial repercussions. Slow steaming has recently become a popular approach for commercial vessels, as a way of reducing fuel consumption, and therefore operating costs, in the current economic and regulatory climate. Traditional methods for the study of ship motions are based on potential flow theory and cannot incorporate viscous effects. Fortunately, unsteady Reynolds-Averaged Navier-Stokes computations are capable of incorporating both viscous and rotational effects in the flow and free surface waves. The key objective of this study is to perform a fully nonlinear unsteady RANS simulation to predict the ship motions and added resistance of a full scale KRISO Container Ship model, and to estimate the increase in effective power and fuel consumption due to its operation in waves. The analyses are performed at design and slow steaming speeds, covering a range of regular head waves, using a commercial RANS solver. The results are validated against available experimental data and are found to be in good agreement with the experiments. Also, the results are compared to those from potential theory. (C) 2015 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.