LES applied to ship research

Numerical simulations using the Reynolds Averaged Navier-Stokes (RANS) methodology have been widely used to study fluid problems in a variety of fields including ship research. Although computationally cheap, RANS fails to predict the fluid behavior accurately in complex flow problems where the underlying physics is dominated by unsteady complex physical phenomena. This paper discusses the use of large eddy simulation (LES) to study such complex flow physics. The predictive capability of LES is demonstrated in three complex flow problems: crashback, cavitation, and hydro-acoustics, which are of particular interest to the ship community. LES results are shown to be in good agreement with experiments for the mean and root mean square values of flow quantities in all these cases.