Cloud-based simulation of flows around marine structures

Ship transport represents more than 80% of the transport of goods and people around the world. To address the growing demand for shipping, the maritime industry is facing new challenges such as a reduction in fuel consumption and improvements in safety. The design of a new ship is complex, dealing with constraints on stability, velocity, manoeuvrability and structural design. Historically, ship design has evolved slowly and is rather conservative. In the past, experiments on scale models have been carried out, but these are costly and restricted to a few designs. The use of Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) provides an alternative way to evaluate a ship’s properties. 

VPLP is a world-renowned international team of French-based naval architects and designers that has been working worldwide in sail and motor craft for 30 years. It designs some of the world’s most innovative racing trimerans. Their designs presently hold many of the world speed sailing records. VPLP is more and more working with CFD. HydrOcean, a subsidiary of Bureau Veritas, offers support for design in the maritime field. This includes risk assessment, the evaluation and optimisation of marine structures such as ships, drilling platforms, marine renewable energy devices and racing yachts. The availability of Cloud-based-HPC CFD simulations would enable it to extend its current services in a competitive market.

An HPC-cloud-based CFD platform based around classical maritime scenarios that are familiar to naval architects has been implemented. The features of this platform include the computation of basic hull resistance and hull resistance in oblique flow. These are of primary interest for shipyards in the determination of the power of the engine to be installed on board. Automated pre-processing support includes advanced meshing and automated post-processing support includes 3D views of pressure and velocity fields and other features of interest. Finally, a portal to enable the secure submission of jobs to the HPC platform has been developed. The platform developed allows the calculation of the basic problems encountered in the marine market in a simple manner and it makes CFD simulation accessible to the non-expert user. Such advanced simulations are a real alternative to the use of expensive tests and models.