Ship hydrodynamics computations with isogeometric analysis

Due to the growing computational power and performance of computational methods, it is now widely recognized that computer modelling and simulation is the third pillar of science, alongside with theory and experimentation. The development of mathematical models describing physics, and their implementation on supercomputers, is now mature. In the section ship hydrodynamics research we use and develop computational methods to tackle problems in which detailed physics plays a key role.

To this purpose we employ the isogeometric analysis (IGA) methodology which is a unified modeling framework that carries excellent accuracy, robustness and efficiency properties. It has found recent applications in various fields of science. IGA is an effort to close the gap between on one hand
Computer-Aided Design (CAD) and on the other Computer-Aided Engineering (CAE). Finite element analysis (FEA) and CAD use a different representation for the geometry which makes a geometry update unpleasant and time-consuming. IGA corrects this deficiency by employing the same NURBS (non-uniform rational B-splines) geometry description as in CAD. This means that the NURBS surfaces in IGA match with the \textit{exact} CAD geometry, in contrast to FEA where the basis functions form an approximation of the CAD geometry. IGA leads to higher-order and higher-continuity discretizations on complex domains.

Developed isogeometric computational techniques are adapted to study the behavior of turbulence, incompressible free-surface flows, compressible flows and fluid-structure interaction. Particular applications include the study of the impact of a dam break, examining the behavior of ships in head sea and assessing the performance of Flettner rotors.

Participants