Parametric studies of exhaust smoke–superstructure interaction on a naval ship using CFD

The prediction of flow path of exhaust plume from the ship funnels is extremely complicated since the phenomenon is affected by a large number of parameters like wind velocity and direction, level of turbulence, geometry of the structures on ship’s deck, efflux velocity of smoke etc. To complicate the matters, the entire turbulent flow field is subject to abrupt changes as the yaw angle changes. In order to understand how the smoke is brought down to ship’s deck, it is necessary to have a knowledge of the funnel exhaust behavior very early in the design spiral of the ship by undertaking parametric investigation of the interaction effect between exhaust smoke and the ship superstructure. This paper presents such a parametric investigation on representative topside configurations of a generic frigate using computational fluid dynamics (CFD). The results presented have been analysed for a total of 112 different cases by varying velocity ratios and onset wind direction for four superstructure configurations. Use of both experimental and computational approaches has been made so that they become complementary to each other. The CFD simulation has been done using the computational code FLUENT version 6.0. Closure was achieved by using the standard k–ε turbulence model. The parametric study has demonstrated that CFD is a powerful tool to study the problem of exhaust smoke–superstructure interaction on ships and is capable of providing a means of visualising the path of the exhaust under different operating conditions very early in the design spiral of a ship.