An Investigation of Ship Airwakes by Scale Adaptive Simulation

An early assessment of the ship airwakes flow characteristic is one of the most challenging tasks associated with the designing of vessels. The presence of ship airwake creates very complex flow phenomena due to the presence of strong velocity gradients in space and time and widely varying high levels of recirculation and turbulence. Under such condition, the landing and take-off operation of a helicopter over the ship helodeck is very complex and accurate prediction represents a computational challenge. We present time-accurate scale-adaptive simulation (SAS) of turbulent flow around a simple frigate ship to gain insight into the flow phenomena over the helodeck. Numerical analysis is carried out after several grids and time-steps refinement to ensure the spatial and temporal accuracy of the numerical data. The instantaneous iso-surface of eddy flow structures and vorticity have been analysed across the vertical and longitudinal plane. Results show good agreement with experimental data. Comparisons of mean quantities and velocity spectra show good agreement, indicating that SAS can resolve the large-scale turbulent structures which can adversely impact ship-helo combined operations. Overall, the SAS approach is shown to capture the unsteady flow features of massively separated ship airwake characteristics with reasonable accuracy.