Numerical simulation of free surface flows around shallowly submerged hydrofoil by OpenFOAM

The validation of the Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) methodology for numerical simulation of two-dimensional unsteady incompressible viscous flow generated by a shallowly submerged hydrofoil under the free surface is described in this study. The computations are performed using a finite volume discretization incorporated with the interface capturing volume of fluid (VOF) method to solve the fluid equations in motion. The standard k-ε turbulence model is used to capture turbulent flow around the hydrofoil in the free surface zone at different submergence depth ratios. The wave profiles, pressure contours, velocity contours, lift and drag coefficients are compared for the different Froude numbers based on submergence depth to demonstrate the influence of free surface on performance of the hydrofoil. A comparison of numerical and experimental results show that an accurate representation of the free surface flows can be obtained with the present numerical scheme.