Evaluation of Slamming Loads on Ship Bow Section Adopting SPH and RANSE Method

Different numerical methods have been applied to the evaluation of slamming loads on a typical ship bow section, for which experimental data of drop tests has been made available within MARSTRUCT thematic network. Experimental data cover different drop cases, with variable speed and different heel angles. Numerical techniques adopted are a commercial CFD VOF program and Smoothed Particles Hydrodynamics Method (SPH) currently under development at DINAV; results from both methods are presented and compared with available experimental data, allowing to make an assessment of these different techniques and to stress their relative merits and shortcomings. Regarding SPH, most of calculations are performed using a conventional treatment of boundaries with repulsive forces, while a few tests have been performed with a novel boundary treatment which adopts variable smoothing length ghost particles (VSLGP), with promising results in terms of computational efficiency.