Numerical Simulation of Ship Maneuvers through Self-Propulsion

The typical maneuvering of a ship can reflect its maneuvering characteristics, which are closely related to the safety and economy of its navigation. The accurate prediction of a ship’s maneuvering characteristics is essential for its preliminary design. This paper adopts the overset grid method to deal with multibody motion and the body-force method to describe the thrust distribution of the propeller at the model scale, as well as to obtain the changes in the hydrodynamic load and the characteristic parameters in a computational fluid dynamics (CFD) maneuver simulation. Then, the paper compares the results with those of a self-propulsion experiment conducted at the China Ship Scientific Research Center. The numerical results show that the maneuverability characteristics obtained from the CFD simulation are in satisfactory agreement with the experimental values, which demonstrates the applicability and reliability of the combination of the overset grid with the body-force method in the numerical prediction of the typical maneuvering of a ship. This provides an effective pre-evaluation method for the prediction of a ship’s maneuvering through self-propulsion.