SPH simulations of bow waves dynamics

The present study aims to provide further understanding of the dynamics of the ship bow waves. From a physical point of view, it is important to understand how the bow wave breaking process develops and how it modifies the wake field. To tackle the problem the ship bow is modeled with simple wedge geometries moving through the water in stationary forward motion at different speeds. For this geometry, experimental measurements are available in the literature (see Waniewski [4]). The problem has been simulated using the ? - SP H model and an in depth analysis of the 3D wave pattern has been done for different bow shapes and for different Froude numbers. The latter has been chosen to get overturning bow waves generating intense splash-up cycles. A preliminary 2D+t analysis has been performed to identify the main characteristic lengths of the bow wave plunging jet. In order to be able to carry intensive computations an SPH hybrid MPI-OpenMP programming model has been used. The physical characteristics of the bow breaking wave are investigated and the outcomes are compared with both experimental and numerical results from Finite Volume Level Set (FVM-LS) calculations.