Validation of damaged ship hydrodynamics by a Domain Decomposition Approach using the Harmonic Polynomial Cell method and OpenFOAM

Flooding of ship compartments is a complex physical phenomenon involving exchange of floodwater, water dynamics inside damaged hull and vortex shedding near the damaged opening edges. Here a 2-dimensional (2D) domain decomposition (DD) strategy is proposed, where a Navier Stokes (NS) solver with Volume-of-Fluid (VOF) technique, handling the free-surface evolution, is coupled with a potential-flow solver. Differently from Greco et al. (2004) who used a Boundary Element Method in their water-on-deck study, here, the Harmonic Polynomial Cell (HPC) method, proposed by Shao and Faltinsen (2012, 2014) is adopted, which has been proved to be very efficient and accurate. The DD is compared against dedicated model tests and used to complement the physical analysis of the problem.