Advanced CFD Simulations of free-surface flows around modern sailing yachts using a newly developed openFOAM solver

While plain vanilla OpenFOAM has strong capabilities with regards to quite a few typical CFD-tasks, some problems actually require additional bespoke solvers and numerics for efficient computation of high-quality results. One of the fields requiring these additions is the computation of large-scale free-surface flows as found e.g. in naval architecture. This holds especially for the flow around typical modern yacht hulls, often planing, sometimes with surface-piercing appendages. Particular challenges include, but are not limited to, breaking waves, sharpness of interface, numerical ventilation (aka streaking) and a wide range of flow phenomenon scales. A new OF-based application including newly implemented discretization schemes, gradient computation and rigid body motion computation is described. In the following the new code will be validated against published experimental data; the effect on accuracy, computational time and solver stability will be shown by comparison to standard OF-solvers (interFoam / interDyMFoam) and Star CCM+. The code’s capabilities to simulate complex “real-world” flows are shown on a well-known racing yacht design.