Seakeeping Analysis of Sailing Yacht Hulls and Centerboard Effect: Comparison Between B.E.M. and R.A.N.S. approaches

The seakeeping of a floating body, whether in motion or simply standing still, is recently becoming a crucial part in the design and the engineering process from large offshore platforms to racing sailing yachts. The recent advance in computational power and the CFD validations have boosted the possibility of consider the seakeeping characteristics in the design loop of any object which requires particular performance in terms of motion’s amplitudes, slamming risks and seasickness indexes in operational conditions. The present work aims to analyse which geometrical, inertial and non-linear aspects must be taken into account in the hydrodynamic design of a sailing yacht concerning its heave, pitch and roll degrees of freedom. The analysis is performed by means of a fast Potential Method (HydroStar from B.V.) and a complex RANS CFD code, (Star-CCM+ from CD-Adapco). After a first familiarization with the numerical tools, the comparison will be presented for a cruise-racer sailing yacht trying to identify the main differences in terms of Response Amplitude Operators to regular waves.