CFD prediction of full-scale ship parametric roll in head wave

Abstract With the advances in available brute-force computing power, parallel computations (overset grid technology and meta-modeling) will eventually open a path to the widespread application of full-scale computations. This study presents a computational fluid dynamics (CFD) prediction of a full-scale ship parametric roll in a regular head wave. An in-house unsteady Reynolds-averaged Navier–Stokes (URANS) CFD code was used for the simulations. The ONR Tumblehome surface combatant was selected as the research object, and the full-scale ship was studied under the same conditions as the model tests. Comparisons between the CFD results and model test results from the reference show good agreement and validate that the code could capture the details of parametric roll phenomenon in head waves. The full-scale predictions were compared with the model-scale results to assess the scale effect of the parametric roll. The induced force and moment acting on the hull under the parametric roll were analyzed. Simulations for ships with bilge keels were also performed at model- and full-scale to evaluate the effect of bilge keels. Numerical results demonstrate that the in-house URANS code could be used to predict the parametric roll characteristics for a full-scale ship at the design stage in the future.