A study on the effect of the cushion pressure on a planing surface

The study of a planing flat plate may be considered as a topic of wide interest for academic and industrial applications. From experimental and numerical studies, flow separation occurs near the stagnation point and a thin jet sprays forward along the plate, while a clear wave pattern develops downstream. In the present study, the effect on the jet-root position caused by a cushion pressure applied on the downstream free surface is considered and the consequent variation in lift and drag coefficients is studied. This canonical problem is important in the design of Surface Effects Ships (SES), the bow seal of which may be assumed as a planing deformable surface with a cushion pressure behind it. This study focuses on the hydrodynamic interaction between the plate and the cushion pressure; as such, the plate geometry is prescribed. A two-dimensional numerical study of this problem has been performed in the present work using a finite-volume Chimera-overlapping-grids approach to numerically solve the Navier-Stokes equations; the free surface is handled by means of two-phase level-set method. Validity of the results is assessed by the comparison with theoretical and numerical results available in the literature.