With more than 80 percent of the total global trade being transported through international shipping, the world relies on a safe, secure and efficient international shipping industry. Being a truly international industry, it can only operate effectively if regulations and standards are agreed, adopted and implemented on an international basis. The IMO (International Maritime Organisation) is the United Nations specialised agency that provides the regulatory framework for this process.
One of those regulations, IMO regulation 749.18, ‘Severe wind and rolling criterion (weather criterion)’, ensures a vessel has sufficient transversal stability to resist over-rolling in severe side winds. Due to the necessarily conservative nature of the regulation (enabling it to be broadly applicable to a multitude of vessels), slender vessels like the DAMEN Fast Crew Support (FCS) 3307 have difficulties in satisfying the empirical requirements of the regulation, thus necessitating expensive experimentation in order to demonstrate the vessel’s compliance with the regulation.
In order to reduce the cost of proving compliance, DAMEN is developing, in partnership with its Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) code supplier Cadence Design Systems, a CFD methodology that can be used in lieu of experimentation.
They conducted a CFD validation campaign where a wind tunnel test of the DAMEN FCS3307 vessel was numerically replicated.
As the motivation for using the CFD approach is primarily cost and time related, it is imperative that the methodology be both sufficiently accurate but also with as low as possible computational cost and total turnaround time. The methodology reflects these aims.
