Company

FLOWTECH International AB

SHIPFLOW stems from long term research at FLOWTECH International AB in close cooperation with SSPA and the Naval Architecture Department at Chalmers University of Technology.

The number of SHIPFLOW licenses has grown steadily since the first version was released by FLOWTECH in 1992. Top Shipyards, Consultants and Universities are among the SHIPFLOW users. Developed by naval architects, physicists and numerical analysts the software is optimised for ship hydrodynamics design. Specialisation means SHIPFLOW is effective and user friendly. No general purpose code can compete with SHIPFLOW in hull design: grids are automatically generated, resistance and propulsion data are presented in the naval architects way and the solvers are adapted for hull geometries. Over the past twenty years SHIPFLOW has developed into the world standard for ship hydrodynamics CFD.

Combination of CFD Tools -- a Key Feature

Lead times are more and more compressed in ship design, particularly at the initial phase where many variants need to be evaluated in a short period of time. An efficient possibility is offered by the potential flow panel methods in the SHIPFLOW. The module XPAN, which predicts important quantities like waves and wave resistance rapidly, yet with accuracy sufficient for hull ranking, and SHIPFLOW MOTIONS which predicts the ship motions and added resistance in waves. Viscous effects are also important and implemented in the SHIPFLOW module XCHAP. Using SHIPFLOWS advanced gridding technique an array of optimisations can be done. For example, bare hull total resistance, flow into the propeller plane, propeller open water tests, self propulsion, appendage optimisation etc.

Advanced gridding technique

Creating grids is paramount and the key to SHIPFLOW's success. This is where the SHIPFLOW specialisation towards Naval Architects is most obvious. Firstly, grids for the RANS solvers as well as meshes for XPAN are created automatically from the hull shape. Various types of hull shapes can be handled, such as monohulls, twin skeg hulls, multihulls, sailing yachts etc. In addition to this SHIPFLOW uses an efficient overlapping grid technique for use with appendages. This method has the advantage of being very flexible making optimisation of appendages convenient. Using parameters and coordinates the design, position and orientation of the appendage can be varied. An example of appendage is energy saving devices which are then easily varied and optimized. Other examples are, rudders, brackets, shafts, vortex generators, pod struts and housings etc. All interactions between the grids are taken care of automatically.

Complete Package

SHIPFLOW Design – Advanced/Basic is a complete package including pre processing, gridding/meshing, CFD-solvers and post processing. We are able to offer this due to our close cooperation with Friendship Systems. Friendship Systems make and market an advanced optimisation tool -- CAESES. SHIPFLOW Design is a subset of this program with some limitations when it comes to optimisation and parametric modelling.

Naturally we are happy to package SHIPFLOW together with CAESES.