Numerical simulation and experimental research on wake field of ships under off-design conditions

Different operating conditions (e.g. design and off-design) may lead to a significant difference in the hydrodynamics performance of a ship, especially in the total resistance and wake field of ships. This work investigated the hydrodynamic performance of the well-known KRISO 3600 TEU Container Ship (KCS) under three different operating conditions by means of Particle Image Velocimetry (PIV) and Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD). The comparison results show that the use of PIV to measure a ship's nominal wake field is an important method which has the advantages of being contactless and highly accurate. Acceptable agreements between the results obtained by the two different methods are achieved. Results indicate that the total resistances of the KCS model under two off-design conditions are 23.88% and 13.92% larger than that under the designed condition, respectively.