A Fluid-Structure Interaction Model on the Hydroelastic Analysis of a Container Ship Using preCICE

Abstract Commercial vessels have recently shown a common trend in increasing their sizes to meet the growing demand for transportation and operations. This trend may however result in more flexible or ‘softer’ hulls. The flexible hull structure reduces the ship natural frequency close to the wave encounter frequency, increasing the probability of resonance or high-frequency vibrations. Meanwhile, the resulting structural deformations from flexible hull could significantly affect the flow field and the hydrodynamic loads cannot be estimated accurately. Hence, it is important to treat a flexible hull and its surrounding flow field as an interacting system to predict a ship’s dynamic behaviour based on the hydroelastic theory. In this study, a novel fluid-structure interactions coupling scheme using the “preCICE” library to communicate with the fluid solver “OpenFOAM” and structure solver “calculiX” was first proposed to study the hydroelastic behavior of a container ship with a forward speed in regular waves. With the advantage of this numerical model, the flexible behaviour of this ship, such as its vertical bending displacement and corresponding bending moment can be quantified, and the “springing” and “whipping” responses can be calculated. It is believed that the present FSI model will exhibit more advantages over the traditional rigid-body methods currently used in the ship seakeeping field.