CFD analysis of the hydrodynamic performance of two candidate America's Cup AC33 hulls

Ignazio Maria Viola, R.G.J. Flay, R. Ponzini

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract / Description of output

The Computational Fluid Dynamics analysis of the hydrodynamic performance of two America’s Cup design candidates is presented. Two fully appended hulls were tested in a free to sink and trim condition at Froude numbers ranging from 0.22 to 0.44. The experimental data of the first of the two hulls was known a priori and was used to investigate several computational parameters (topology and resolution of the grid, time step, discretization order, initial and boundary conditions). This hull was also used to perform the verification and validation of the numerical model at a Froude number of 0.22. The resistance was computed within an uncertainty of 2.2% at the 95% confidence level, while the numerical/experimental error was lower than 0.8%. The validated model was used to compute the resistance of the two hulls at the other Froude numbers. The maximum numerical/experimental error across all the tested Froude numbers was 1.3% and 4.1% for the two hulls respectively. Different ways of computing the skin friction are discussed and an approach to reduce the effect of numerical ventilation using the source term in the vof transport equation is recommended. Finally, the scalability of the code for parallel processing was tested and it was found that 32 processes enabled a 20 times speed up compared to a serial computation.
Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)B1-B12
Number of pages13
JournalTransactions of the Royal Institution of Naval Architects Part B: International Journal of Small Craft Technology
Volume154
Issue number1
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2012

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of 'CFD analysis of the hydrodynamic performance of two candidate America's Cup AC33 hulls'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this