ON THE USE OF CFD FOR THE DESIGN OF YACHT HULLS

摘要

There are three main methods to assess the hydrodynamic characteristics of yachts, namely, viscous and inviscid numerical analysis, and experimental tests. Computational tools are now widely used in yacht design because of the rapid growth of high-powered computers during the last ten years. Viscous computational fluid dynamic codes are now one of the most important tools in design offices, in marine and other fields, and in some fields they have completely replaced inviscid codes and experimental tests. A deeper awareness of the uncertainty of RANS code results is necessary, achievable with a rigorous application of a verification and validation process. The effectiveness of numerical methods is discussed with regards to their application to yacht design. Potentialities and limitations of numerical methods are discussed showing that these must be used with caution, so as to provide a reliable suite of design tools.