Ship Airwake Analysis by CFD Methods

Abstract

This study is concerned with computational predictions of the highly unsteady turbulent airwake of nonaviation ships. This is the first step in studying complex flow field of fully coupled helicopter/ship interaction. Numerical simulations carried out in this study are performed by using commercial CFD solver CFX 10.0 and FLUENT 6.2.16. The flows around two generic frigate models are investigated. A number of different mesh topologies and various turbulence models are used. Calculations were carried out for steady and unsteady conditions. Predicted results are partially validated against measured surface pressure, normalized velocity and wind tunnel flow visualizations data.