Assessment of ship squat in shallow water using CFD

In the recent years much research effort in ship hydromechanics is devoted to the practical navigation problems in getting larger ships safely into existing harbours or to the appropriate design of expansion of harbours for safe accommodation of larger ships. Both these problems are directly related to the safety of navigation and therefore they receive high attention from ship designers, harbour designers, ship operators and maritime administration. The starting point of any navigational or design analysis lies in the accurate determination of the hydrodynamic forces generated on the ship hull moving in confined waters. The analysis of such ship motion should include the effects of shallow water, horizontal restrictions, asymmetric channels, muddy bottoms, ship squat, ship to ship interactions etc. It is natural to use advanced Computational Fluid Dynamics methods for this purpose. The paper includes a wide introduction into the problems of modelling of the restricted water effects on ship motion using CFD. This presentation is illustrated with the examples of calculations performed using the commercial system Fluent.