Investigation on a damaged ship model sinking into water based on three dimensional SPH method

• A 3D SPH parallel program is applied and the efficiency is also studied.
• The improved moving least square is introduced to correct the consistency problem.
• The experiments of two scaled ship models with different openings are carried out.
• The sinking process of the broadside opening model agrees well with that of the experiment.

Damaged ship at sea will be a direct threat to lives and property, and it has a great significance of studying ship's remaining buoyancy, stability, sinking time and other important parameters. The process of a damaged ship sinking into water is a complex motion involving ship hull, inner and outer fluid coupled with waves and many other factors. It is featured by high nonlinearity and hard to establish a precise theoretical model to study. Yet SPH (smoothed particle hydrodynamics) as a meshfree method has a great advantage in solving such problems because of the nature of self-adaptive and Lagrangian. Firstly, the experiments of two scaled ship models with different openings sinking into water are carried out, through the sinking processes of broadside opening and bottom opening models, the conclusion is drawn that although the serious loss of stability of broadside opening model, the sinking time and other parameters are more conducive to rescue after maritime distress. Secondly, the parallel program of three dimensional SPH is developed to simulate the above more complex model, broadside opening model. The coupled process of sloshing is compared with that of experiment, and the results show good agreement with each other which verify the accuracy and feasibility of three dimensional parallel program.