Hydrodynamic resistance prediction of an olympic class sailing dinghy using CFD and towing tank testing

Abstract

The study presented in this paper aims at investigating, from a hydrodynamic point of view, the most favourable attitude of a sailing dinghy. The procedure includes both an experimental and a numerical approach. Of interest is if these two methods gives analogous results in terms of resistant force and optimal attitude. The numerical study extends to investigating the effects of adding appendages and leeway to the computational model. As this addition strongly affects the computation attitude can be predicted this way and thus be discarded from future studies of this kind. The included verification and validation study reveals that the resistance is greatly under predicted by the numerical method. Furthermore a complete set of results from the numerical predictions was not obtained which makes the goals of the study unfulfilled. This paper also suggest future work on the topic of sailing.