CFD analysis of the full-scale resistance of an oil tanker in presence of a mud–water interface

The presence of mud layers on the bottom of ports and waterways can have negative effects on the hydrodynamic behaviour of marine vessels. This numerical study investigates the effect of muddy seabeds on the full-scale resistance of an oil tanker sailing straight ahead. The objective is to determine the influence of factors such as the...

Sailing through fluid mud: Verification and Validation of a CFD model for simulations of ships sailing in muddy areas

The increasing size of today's ships is a major concern for navigation in confined waters. In order to ensure safe manoeuvres, port authorities prescribe, among others, a minimum under-keel clearance that must be maintained by the ships during navigation. However, the seabed of ports situated at the estuaries or along rivers is often covered by...

Validation of the resistance of a plate moving through mud: CFD modelling and towing tank experiments

When investigating the effect of muddy seabeds on marine vessels using Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) software, one challenge is to adequately describe the complex non-Newtonian fluid behaviour of mud. Although a number of rheological models have been proposed in the past, mud sediments are often simply regarded either as highly viscous...

An eddy-viscosity model for turbulent flows of Herschel–Bulkley fluids

This article presents a new turbulence closure based on the k-ω SST model for predicting turbulent flows of Herschel–Bulkley fluids, including Bingham and power-law fluids. The model has been calibrated with direct numerical simulations (DNS) data for fully-developed pipe flow of shear-thinning and viscoplastic fluids. The new model shows...

Application of a maritime CFD code to a benchmark problem for non-Newtonian fluids: the flow around a sphere

The ship’s resistance and manoeuvrability in shallow waters can be adversely influenced by the presence of fluid mud layers on the seabed of ports and waterways. Fluid mud exhibits a complex non-Newtonian rheology that is often described using the Herschel–Bulkley model. The latter has been recently implemented in a maritime finite-volume CFD...