Computational study on turbulent flows around modern tanker hull forms

To enhance the applicability of CFD techniques to the hull form design of modern commercial ships, an efficient and robust numerical method for turbulent flow calculation is developed. The preprocessor is composed of hull form presentation, surface mesh generation, and field grid generation. The finite‐volume method is utilised to solve the Reynolds‐averaged Navier–Stokes equations. Three k–ϵ turbulence models, i.e., the standard k–ϵ model (SKE), the RNG‐based k–ϵ model (RNG), and the realisable k–ϵ model (RKE), are evaluated to investigate the difference caused by the turbulence model. The developed numerical method is applied to two practical VLCC hull forms with the same forebody and the slightly different afterbodies in order to find out whether CFD can capture the difference of stern flow due to hull form variation. It is found that RKE successfully predict the strength and location of bilge vortex, while SKE and RNG fail. However, all three models can provide the right information on the nominal wake difference between two hull forms. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.