Development and Validation of CFD Analysis Procedure for Predicting Wind Load on Commercial Ships

Abstract

This paper describes a numerical procedure for the prediction of the wind load on various types of commercial ships, such as LNGC, oil tanker and container ship. As the size of vessels increases, wind load is playing a more important role when sailing in an open sea and mooring at harbors. To estimate wind load, 3D steady RANS CFD simulation is performed and validated with experimental results obtained from wind tunnel tests. The effect of turbulence source is studied to maintain the turbulence intensity profile at the test section of the wind tunnel and the boundary layer mesh is also investigated to improve the accuracy. The discrepancy in force and moment coefficients between CFD results and wind tunnel tests is reduced and the comparison results show good agreements.