A numerical study of breaking bow waves for different ship hulls

Following the analysis performed by Colagrossi et al. [1] on the numerical study of wave breaking , an in-depth description of the bow wave patterns for three different ship hulls is presented. The analysis is limited to fast slender ships with sharp stem. Under these conditions the longitudinal gradients of the flow quantities are negligible respect to the transversal ones. Therefore a 2D + t approach can be adopted instead of a more CPU-time consuming 3D simulation [2]. The pre-breaking evolution is analyzed by means of a BEM-MEL solver while the subsequent post-breaking stages are modeled through the SPH method. The paper is organized as follow: in the first section a brief description of numerical models is provided. Then a description of the three hulls is given and, finally, an in-depth study of the Froude number influence on bow breaking phenomena is discussed for the vessels under consideration.