Ship Motions and Added Resistance with a BEM in frequency and time domain

This thesis is focused on the calculation of ship motions and on the evaluation of added resistance in waves. A partial desingularized panel method based on potential theory has been developed. Rankine sources are distributed on the hull and at small distance above the free surface. In such way only the free surface is desingularized. This choice allows to consider also thin hull shapes at the bow where desingularization could cause numerical problems. The main advantage of this approach leads to reduce the computational time, especially when non linear effects are considered, provided an adequate source-panel center vertical distance is selected. The fluid domain boundaries have been represented as a structured grid consisting of flat quadrilater panels. In the linear case the boundary conditions have been applied on the mean body wetted surface and the free-surface is considered at the calm water level. By using an Eulerian timestepping integration scheme the kinematic and dynamic boundary conditions are updated on the free-surface at every time-step. After the potential is obtained, the pressure on the mean hull surface can be calculated and forces and moments can be determined by integrating the pressure on the body surface. Therefore in two-dimensional environment an introduction of non-linear effects has been analysed. In particular a 2D body exact method has been developed. The added resistance is determined by a near field method integrating the second-order pressure on the body surface. Then it is corrected using a semi-empirical method to allow to consider the wave reflection of short waves. The adequacy of the results has been verified applying the code to different test cases and comparing the numerical output with experimental data available in literature. Furthermore in order to discuss the improvements obtained with this present method the results have been compared with another numerical method in frequency domain.