CFD for ships - SHIPFLOW 6.0 released

The two major news are:

• SHIPFLOW MOTIONS, a new CFD solver for sea keeping.
• The RANS solver XCHAP is now 10 times faster compared to the current release.

SHIPFLOW MOTIONS is a new flow solver for computing ship motions in waves. It is a time accurate fully non-linear boundary element method which can be used to compute ship motions and added resistance in regular and irregular waves as well as wave resistance, sinkage and trim in calm water. Typical results are time series and response amplitude operators. We believe that the method will be a useful tool for ship designers with higher accuracy than traditional potential flow methods while at the same time being faster than the available RANS methods.

The SHIPFLOW 6 RANS solver XCHAP is now up to 10 times faster than its predecessor (version 5.2). A CFD computation for resistance can be run within 15 minutes and a self-propulsion simulation within 1 hour on a workstation. The increased solver performance and the efficient self-propulsion capability in SHIPFLOW makes automatic shape optimization of ship sterns feasible for ship designers. The delivered power can be optimized with self-propulsion simulations taking the two, often conflicting, aspects of resistance and propeller efficiency directly into account. SHIPFLOW 6 and CAESES* have been used successfully for stern shape optimizations of mono and twin-skeg hulls.