The Fluid Structure Interactions group (University of Southampton) has been extensively involved in many research projects focusing on computations of ship wake field and the interactions between the propeller, rudder and the hull. A finite-volume RANS code, OpenFOAM (OpenFOAM, 2014) has been used mostly in majority of these works. The goal of the group has been to improve the in-house capability of prediction of ship stern flows using open-source software. In the present work OpenFOAM is benchmarked against a commercial code, Star-CCM+ (Star-CCM+, 2012), with the aim of exploring the differences in flow field results originating from particular features of both implementations.The Japan Bulk Carrier (JBC) has been chosen as a test case representative of the challenges faced in modern ship flow modelling. This vessel is fitted with an energy saving duct. The JBC case is part of the Tokyo 2015 CFD workshop and the latest in the series of benchmarking workshops to assess the state of art of marine CFD (Larsson et al., 2014). All computations are performed under steady state, fixed (even keel) conditions using identical grids and similar numerical setup. Presented analysis focuses on the mean flow, vortical structures and global hull forces.
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