Need some help

[Lovre]

I'm not a marine engineer so I'm very new to all this stuff. I'm a student of automation and control, and I have one idea for some project so I need some help from you. Is there any simulation tool that can simulate hydrodinamics of let's say hull of a boat? For example, if I would design a hull in Maxsurf or in some other designig tool could I make simulations of hydrodynamics? Like if I'd like to know how fast would boat go with different motor power and things like that ?
Or is there any designing tool for submarines ?

Thanke you,
Lovre

[marshmat]

Depends how much detail you want.
If you're just after a good estimate of resistance, and you're sticking to long thin hull shapes that don't plane, something like Michlet (free research code, search for it on here) can be pretty handy.
If you want to know what the pressure distribution on the hull is, how the lift is distributed, where to expect flow separation, etc.... you'd be looking at a full-fledged CFD solver like Fluent 6 ($20k typically), in which case you'd also be looking at the multiple university-level courses needed to understand how to work Fluent.
If you're a computer nut and big on Linux, and can write code pretty well, try OpenFOAM (free, but Linux-only and requires advanced programming skills to use).

[Lovre]

Actually I'm interested mostly in software that would allow me to simulate hydrodynamics of a vessel, so I would need some results like acceletarion, speed, angular acceleration , and thing like that that would give me the perspective on how vessel behaves when different force is applied on him(different sum, and different angle of force). This is more of a physicist problem than a naval engenireeng but I hope that somebody has some experience in this.

Lovre

[Andrew Mason]

Maxsurf has a companion program named Seakeeper which calculates motions and accelerations - see http://www.formsys.com/maxsurf/msproducts/seakeeper

[MikeJohns]

Andrew
I'm curious
What hull forms and sizes have you validated this against wrt yacht hulls and keel configs ?

Cheers

[Andrew Mason]

Mike

Suggest you have a look at the Seakeeper manual (http://www225.pair.com/magic/ftp/Maxsurf/SKManual.pdf) for details of the theoretical background of the program. The manual also contains some validation against a commercial ship shape and a catamaran hull shape, however no specific validation of yacht hulls is included.

Modern yacht hulls, in the upright case without keels, are very suited to analysis in Seakeeper, as the Lewis mapping used on the section shapes is quite close and the forward speeds are relatively low.

Andrew