Hydro-structure interactions
Technical Bulletin 2014

In parallel with the development of complex hydrodynamic models, BV’s Research Department has invested a significant amount of effort in the development of accurate, efficient and innovative methods to compute the hydro-elastic response of ships. Where the classical hydrodynamic methods consider a rigid body moving in waves, these new methods consider that the ship deformations do have an influence on the loads applied by the waves. This is needed especially for highly flexible structures such as ultra-large container ships and LNG carriers. The Bureau Veritas general hydro-structure interaction tool Homer is the leading software in this field, providing a consistent evaluation of the hydro-elastic structural response of ships.

Different papers presented in this section detail the hydro-elastic methods implemented in Homer, with a focus on several specific aspects:  the hydro-elastic response of ships carrying liquid cargos; the computation of slamming loads and associated whipping response, and its validation with experimental data; the computation of the hydro-elastic restoring stiffness for ultra-large container ships; the use of improved beam models for ultra-large container ships, compared with full three-dimensional finite element models.

In addition, Bureau Veritas Research Department is also developing and validating new hydro-elastic methods based on the free-surface CFD tool OpenFOAM, which should allow to model non-linear phenomenon more accurately, such as slamming and green water.

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