Numerical simulation of planing hulls

This paper deals with the numerical simulation of the flow on hard chine planing boat. In the past it has been difficult to study this kind of vessel by means of the available methods, such as panel methods, normally used to compute conventional ships at low speed. The method we investigated to deal with this problem is a RANSE solver where the complex behavior of the free surface is computed with a special kind of VOF (Volume of Fluid) method. The results obtained using this method for real hull shapes are compared with the experimental results. This comparison shows good agreement between the present results and those obtained by experimental methods for estimating resistance; some examples are presented in the paper.