Study on the flooding characteristics of a deep-water submarine based on δ plus-smoothed particle hydrodynamics method and graphic processing units acceleration

Abstract

The process of a damaged ship flooding is a complicated free surface flow problem. There is a complex coupling effect between the ship cabin and the flow inside and outside of the cabin. In this paper, a GPU (graphic processing unit)-δ+-SPH (smoothed particle hydrodynamics) numerical model for the cabin flooding in deep-water environments is developed based on GPU parallel acceleration technology and Nvidia's CUDA (compute unified device architecture). First, the computational accuracy and efficiency of this numerical model are verified by experiments results on the water flooding of a simple damaged cabin model. Furthermore, the flooding characteristics of a submarine cabin are analyzed, considering different numbers of damaged cabins, depths, and opening positions. Finally, the progressive flooding and the dynamic response characteristics of a full-scale submarine model are investigated. The results show that the process of progressive flooding in a submarine cabin is characterized by its rapidity and intensity. Different factors, for example, damaged cabin numbers, cabin depths, and opening positions, have great influences on the process of flooding and the motion of the submarine cabin. This study can offer valuable technical assistance in the post-damage remediation process.