Numerical study of damaged ship's compartment sinking with air compression effect

Abstract The computational fluid dynamics (CFD) method was applied to study the dynamics of damaged ship during flooding and sinking process, in which the air compression effect was taken into account. The studied case was a ship's compartment with bottom damage sinking into calm water. To investigate the air flow effect, the compartment was set to be fully ventilated, partially ventilated and airtight for different cases. In the numerical simulation, the air was treated as ideal gas. The volume of fluid method was adopted to capture the air and water interface. The shear stress transport model was employed for turbulence modelling. The technique of dynamic layering mesh was used to deal with the ship sinking motion. All the numerical schemes were implemented with the CFD solver ANSYS-Fluent. The benchmarking results were presented and discussed, including the time and gird dependence studies, the turbulent model against the laminar model, the air compressible model against the incompressible model and the computation against the model test. The effect of air flow on water flooding and ship sinking was also analysed.