Study of ship wave breaking patterns using 3D parallel SPH simulations

An analysis of the 3D wave pattern generated by a ship in stationary forward motion has been performed with a specific focus on the bow breaking wave. For this purpose a novel 3D parallel SPH solver has been designed and preliminarily tested using a specifically conceived geometry. Since the numerical effort to simulate 3D flows is considerable, an ad hoc hybrid MPI-OpenMP programming model has been developed to achieve simulations of hundred million of particles running on a computer cluster. The outcomes have been compared with experimental measurements and numerical results from RANS calculations. (C) 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.