CFD prediction of ship-bank interaction for KCS under extreme conditions

When the ship speed exceeds a certain level in shallow water, ship-bank interaction induces great influence on the ship’s manoeurability with some special hydrodynamic characteristics, but the mechanism is not totally understood. This paper presents a numerical prediction of the ship-bank interaction for the model of the KRISO Container Ship. An unsteady Reynold-Averaged Navier Stokes solver is applied to simulate the viscous flows. A grid convergence study is performed and the numerical results are compared with the experimental data. The hydrodynamic forces and moments and the squat are computed for different water depths and ship-to-bank distances. Results show that the sway force changes into a repulsive force with respect to the bank under the condition of h = 1.15T or Frh > 0.528 at h = 1.3T, which is due to the change of sway force distribution. The comparison of the results with and without free-surface modelling shows that the wave elevation affects the sway force distribution along the ship significantly. The detailed sway force distributions and wave elevations explain that the wave action between the ship and the bank is the key enabler of the occurrence of the repulsive sway force under the extreme conditions.