CFD numerical simulation of a container ship turning motion

Abstract The ship turning motion can reflect the turning characteristics of the ship and is closely related to the navigation safety of the ship. In the turning performance test, the trajectory drawn by the center of gravity of the ship is called the turning circle. The turning circle is an important indicator to characterize the turning performance of a ship. At present, the results of ship turning obtained by numerical calculations are still very different from the test ones. In this paper, the free turning motion of a container ship is simulated by a commercial software which is called STARCCM+. In order to reduce the amount of calculation, a body-force propeller model is adopted to replace the real propeller. Through the global solution of the fully viscous flow field, the characteristic parameters and the motion track of the ship turning motion can be gotten. The ship’s motion trajectory and the parameters of the turning motion obtained by numerical prediction are in good agreement with the test values, which fully proves the applicability and reliability of the proposed method in numerical prediction.