A Study on Estimation of Manoeuvring Performance in Shallow Water using CFD in Initial Ship Design Phase

Analysis of ship‘s manoeuverability in shallow water is an important task from the perspective of the vessels’ navigational safety. Since the number of ships operated in restricted water has increased due to the enlargement of vessels and ships represent different characteristics of the manoeuverability when operated in shallow and deep water, it is significant to evaluate ship manoeuverability at initial design stage. At the initial stage of design, the estimation of manoeuverability is generally performed with hydrodynamic coefficients estimated based on empirical formula. However, the accuracy of estimating hydrodynamic coefficients by the empirical formula in shallow water is poor compared to that in deep water. Therefore, the error in the estimation of manoeuverability increases in shallow water. In this study, CFD is proposed to improve the accuracy of manoeuverability in shallow water at the initial design stage and hydrodynamic coefficients were obtained based on PMM test in shallow water. Furthermore, the ship manoeuverability was estimated both the proposed strategy and the empirical formula. At last, validity of the proposed strategy using CFD for the estimation of manoeuverability was confirmed by comparison with the manoeuverability estimation results from model test.