Scale effects on hydrodynamic manoeuvring force prediction

This paper investigates the influence of ship model size on the manoeuvring hydrodynamic coefficients utilising the Reynolds Averaged Navier-Stokes solver STAR-CCM+. The hydrodynamic forces and yaw moment on a KRISO Very Large Crude Carrier (KVLCC2) model have been predicted for a static drift and a pure sway test and validated against benchmark model scale test. Good correlations between the measured and computed force and moment results were observed. On validating the numerical prediction technique, a set of systematic simulations on different size ship models has been carried out for static drift, pure sway and pure yaw tests to study the scale effects on the forces and moments obtained from the captive manoeuvres. From the obtained results, scale effects are found to influence the predictions of surge force and sway force but are not significant in the yaw moment.