Open Source Computations of Planing Hull Resistance

In recent years, the application of Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) methods experienced an exponential growth: the increase of the computational performances and the generalization of the Navier-Stokes equation to more complex physical problems made possible the solution of complex problems like free surfaces flows. The physical complexity of planing hulls flows poses some issues in the ability to numerically predict the global hydrodynamic parameters (hull resistance, dynamic attitude) of these configurations and on the expected confidence on the numerical results. In the last decade, commercial RANS software have been successfully applied for the prediction of the planing hull characteristics with reasonable correlation to the available experimental measurements. Recently, moreover, the interest in Open Source approaches, also for the solution of engineering problems, has rapidly grow. In this work, a set of calculations on a systematic series standard hull shape has been carried out, adopting from pre- to post- processing only Open Source tools. The comparison and the validation, through the available experimental measurements, of the computed results will define an optimal simulation strategy to include this kind of tools in the usual design loop.