CFD Simulation and Experimental Study on Coupled Motion Response of Ship with Tank in Beam Waves

Abstract

Tank sloshing is widely present in many engineering fields, especially in the field of marine. Due to the trend of large-scale liquid cargo ships, it is of great significance to study the coupled motion response of ships with tanks in beam waves. In this study, the CFD (Computational Fluid Dynamics) method and experiments are used to study the response of a ship with/without a tank in beam waves. All the computations are performed by an in-house CFD solver, which is used to solve RANS (Reynold Average Navier-Stokes) equations coupled with six degrees-of-freedom solid-body motion equations. The Level Set Method is used to solve the free surface. Verification work on the grid number and time step size has been conducted. The simulation results agree with the experimental results well, which shows that the numerical method is accurate enough. In this paper, several different working conditions are set up, and the effects of the liquid height in the tank, the size of the tank and the wavelength ratio of the incident wave on the ship’s motion are studied. The results show the effect of tank sloshing on the ship’s motion in different working conditions.