The use of Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) in the marine industry has promised to deliver savings in product development costs and time for the past number of years. Now, with codes such as STAR-CD from the CD adapco Group, the power of CFD has reached the stage where the most difficult marine or naval engineering problems can be routinely handled by today’s powerful computers. With this foresight, the CD adapco group has already developed a wealth of experience in the Naval Hydrodynamics and engineering field stemming from it’s close connections and partnerships with major shipyards, marine research institutes and towing tank facilities over the past years.

These close connections have resulted in the development of a powerful and validated CFD solver for marine applications. Solving the Navier-Stokes equations, the solver includes capabilities for the most complex free-surface flows (e.g. fluid run-off), moving and floating body problems, drop tests, fluid plunge, fully-integrated fluid-structure interaction problems, shallow water coupling, multi-phase problems, propulsion systems and, of course, cavitation problems (including super-cavitating flows) and bubble flows etc. The solver also gives the user complete freedom to integrate multi-degree of freedom models to solve for complex indeterminate or determinate motion problems.