Numerical Prediction of Ship Resistance Based on Volume of Fluid Implicit Multi-Step Method

Abstract

The Volume of Fluid (VOF) method is used in two-phase fluid flow problems of ship hydrodynamic calculations, to capture the motion and distribution of the gas–liquid free surface. To ensure solution stability and accuracy, numerical simulations typically require separate mesh refinement for the free surface or a reduced time step, resulting in a significant increase in solution time. This study aims to compare the drag and vessel attitude change calculations of the VOF implicit multi-step method with the traditional single-step method, and to verify the feasibility of the method in the numerical prediction of ship resistance and flow field analysis. The results show that an implicit multi-step method with a reasonable number of internal iterations could obtain results close to those of the single-step method with a reduced time step, and the error in trim angle was relatively large, about 2%, but the solving time was only about half that of the latter. The method could also capture the shape and location of waves on the hull, especially in the vicinity of the ship, while the distribution of the waves in the far field differed from those in the experiments to some extent.