RANS study on hydrodynamic characteristics of flapped rudders

Abstract

Ships that equipped with flapped rudders have better manoeuvring performance than ships fitted with traditional spade rudders. Moreover, this advantage is achieved without significantly affecting the ship's resistance during normal cruising. Flapped rudders are, therefore, favourable for ships that require high manoeuvring performance and sail long distance. Nowadays, there is a trend of using twin flapped rudders on newly built inland vessels in the Yangtze River. To properly design these ships and analyse their manoeuvring performance, the hydrodynamic characteristics of the flapped rudders are required. In this paper, a RANS study is performed to analyse the impacts of the three main properties of a flapped rudder on its hydrodynamic coefficients. The target properties are the rudder profile, the flaplinkage ratio (the flapped angle relative to the rudder chord line divided by the applied rudder angle), and the flap-area ratio (the sectional area of the flap divided by the total sectional area). The RANS simulations are carried out with commercial meshing tool ANSYS Meshing and CFD solver ANSYS Fluent.