VERTICAL WATER ENTRY OF A 3D FUSELAGE: COMPARISON BETWEEN A POTENTIAL-FLOW MULTISECTION APPROACH AND A FULLY 3D CFD SOLUTION

This paper proposes the analysis of the hydrodynamic behaviour of the vertical water entry of a scaled fuselage. The investigation is carried out with a low-fidelity multisection approach which exploits a 2D fully non-linear potential flow solver based on a hybrid BEMFEM approach. The problem is also investigated through a high-fidelity CFD simulation by using the open-source CFD library OpenFOAM. The aim is to compare the prediction obtained by the multisection approach with those obtained by the 3D CFD solution, in order to highlight the advantages and limitations of the former, which represents an approximated solution of the fully 3D problem.