CFD-BASED HYDRODYNAMIC ANALYSIS FOR A SHIP SAILING ALONG A BANK IN RESTRICTED WATERS

For a ship navigating along a bank in restricted waters, it is usually accompanied by obvious bank effect which may cause ship-bank collision. In order to avoid collision, it is necessary to provide control force and moment by using control devices such as a rudder. In this paper, CFD method is applied to numerically simulate the viscous flow around a ship appended with a rudder sailing along a bank. Systematical simulations are carried out for the hull-rudder system with different rudder angles at different ship-bank distances and water depths. The flow field features and the hydrodynamic forces of the hull-rudder system are obtained and analysed. This study is of significance for revealing the physical mechanism behind the bank effect and providing guidance for ship steering and control in restricted waters.

The Simulation of Sloped Bank Effect Influence on Container Ship Trajectory

The latest container vessel grounding in the Suez Canal, which occurred on 23 March 2021 (the Ever Given), raised many questions regarding the safety of navigation. The sudden concern about safety is due to fears that traffic flow through the Suez Canal could be blocked for longer periods of time. Besides external forces imposed by wind, in this case bank effect had a significant influence on the ship’s grounding. Bank effect occurs due to restricted water flow caused by narrow waterways. Many fairway design standards consider sloped banks such as those of the Suez Canal as unsubstantial in bank-effect forces. This paper analyses the impact of sloped banks on container ship trajectory and proposes minimal distances that may decrease bank-effect forces in order to reduce the risk of vessel grounding and increase the safety of navigation. However, this type of accident has happened before and may occur again due to a small sailing distance from the bank in cases where vessel speed is increased.

A Fast Algorithm for the Prediction of Ship-Bank Interaction in Shallow Water

The hydrodynamic interaction induced by the complex flow around a ship maneuvering in restricted waters has a significant influence on navigation safety. In particular, when a ship moves in the vicinity of a bank, the hydrodynamic interaction forces caused by the bank effect can significantly affect the ship’s maneuverability. An efficient algorithm integrated in onboard systems or simulators for capturing the bank effect with fair accuracy would benefit navigation safety. In this study, an algorithm based on the potential-flow theory is presented for efficient calculation of ship-bank hydrodynamic interaction forces. Under the low Froude number assumption, the free surface boundary condition is approximated using the double-body model. A layer of sources is dynamically distributed on part of the seabed and bank in the vicinity of the ship to model the boundary conditions. The sinkage and trim are iteratively solved via hydrostatic balance, and the importance of including sinkage and trim is investigated. To validate the numerical method, a series of simulations with various configurations are carried out, and the results are compared with experiment and numerical results obtained with RANSE-based and Rankine source methods. The comparison and analysis show the accuracy of the method proposed in this paper satisfactory except for extreme shallow water cases.

Determining Restricted Fairway Additional Width due to Bank Effect for Fine Form Vessels

In order to determine fairway width accurately and to ensure an adequate level of safety, it is necessary to fulfil different safety standards and user needs. There are a number of international recommendations for fairway design, but the recommendations by Permanent International Association of Navigation Congresses (PIANC), Puerto Del Estado (ROM 3·1) and the Japanese Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism (MLIT) are some of the best known. However, in all of these recommendations, additional width due to ship-bank effect is obsolete and needs to be improved. The objective of this paper is to use a navigational simulator with a predefined ship-bank interaction model and fine form ships models to determine the ship trajectory caused by ship-bank effect. The methodology of research used in the paper consisted of using ship trajectory data to propose a deterministic model for improving fairway additional width due to ship-bank effect. Results showed that such a method is not time-consuming and can improve fairway design in terms of ship-bank effect, increasing additional width accuracy.

A study for bank effect on ship traffic in narrow water channels using cellular automata

In narrow water channels, bank might affect nearby ships due to hydrodynamic forces (bank effect). To avoid accidents, different sailing rules (i.e., lane-changing, speed control) are required. In this paper, a two-lane cellular automata model is proposed to evaluate such phenomena. Numerical experiments show that ships will form a “slow-moving chunk” in the bank area, which will significantly block the flux. As further study demonstrated to alleviate bank effect, ship speed and bank length should be controlled.

Numerical Prediction of Ship Hydrodynamic Derivatives in Close Proximity to a Vertical Bank and Maneuvering Stability Analysis

As bank effect has a remarkable influence on the maneuverability of a ship proceeding close to a vertical bank, the assessment of ship maneuvering stability is of great importance. The hydrodynamic derivatives of a ship can reflect the change of the ship’s maneuverability and they are determined with the method of planar motion mechanism (PMM) tests. This paper presents a numerical way to simulate the PMM captive model tests for the ship KVLCC2. A general purpose viscous flow solver was adopted to solve unsteady Reynolds averaged Navier Stokes (RANS) equations in conjunction with a RNG k-ε turbulence model. A hybrid dynamic mesh technique is developed to update the mesh volume around the ship hull when the ship is undertaking pure yaw motions and it turns out efficient and effective to solve the limitation of small ship-bank distance to the mesh configuration and remeshing.. The numerical simulations and the accuracy of the numerical method was validated in comparison with the results of PMM tests in a circulating water channel. Then a series of distances between ship and bank together with different water depths were set for simulating the PMM tests of the KVLCC2 model in proximity to a vertical bank. The first order hydrodynamic derivatives of the ship were analyzed from the time history of lateral force and yaw moment according to the multiple-run simulating procedure. The values of derivatives in different lateral proximities to the bank and variant water depths were compared and it showed some favorable trends for predicting the ship’s maneuverability in the restricted waterways. For example, the influence of velocity derivatives on lateral force reduces while that of velocity derivatives on yaw moment strengthens and this is partly due to the suction force and bow-out moment caused by bank wall effect. The straight line stability and directional stability in terms of the calculated hydrodynamic derivatives were also discussed based on the MMG model for ship maneuvering. Results indicate that the ship is inherently unstable without control and the enhancement of bank effect makes the condition even worse. Moreover, a stable or unstable zone of PD controller parameters focusing on the directional stability was illustrated and setting the values of controller parameters in the range of “Control with high sensitivity” is recommended for cases of the ship navigating in very close proximity to a bank.

CFD-Based Hydrodynamic Analysis for a Ship Sailing Along a Bank in Restricted Waters

For a ship navigating along a bank in restricted waters, it is usually accompanied by obvious bank effect which may cause ship-bank collision. In order to avoid collision, it is necessary to provide control force and moment by using control devices such as a rudder. In this paper, CFD method is applied to numerically simulate the viscous flow around a ship appended with a rudder sailing along a bank. Systematical simulations are carried out for the hull-rudder system with different rudder angles at different ship-bank distances and water depths. The flow field features and the hydrodynamic forces of the hull-rudder system are obtained and analysed. This study is of significance for revealing the physical mechanism behind the bank effect and providing guidance for ship steering and control in restricted waters.