Proceedings of the Thirty-second (2022) International Ocean and Polar Engineering Conference
Shanghai, China, June 5–10, 2022
Copyright © 2022 by the International Society of Offshore and Polar Engineers (ISOPE)
ISBN 978-1-880653-81-4; ISSN 1098-6189

www.isope.org

CFD Study of Trimaran Seakeeping Performance with Various Wave-lengths
Yabo Wei1, Qingjie Meng2, Decheng Wan1*
1

Computational Marine Hydrodynamics Lab (CMHL), School of Naval Architecture, Ocean and Civil Engineering,
Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, China
2Wuhan Second Ship Design and Research Institute, Wuhan, China*Corresponding authoradded resistance (Arribas, 2020). Consequently, when studying theseakeeping performance of trimaran, the added resistance in waves will
also be considered. Gong, Yan and Ma (2020) apply a hybrid method tostudy the trimaran’s added resistance and seakeeping performance inoblique waves. The results show that the wave steepness and wave
incident will affect the trimaran’s added resistance and seakeeping
performance in waves. Gong, Li and Fu (2021) study the trimaran’s
seakeeping performance in waves of various headings at various speeds
and find that the sailing speed has larger effect on added resistance thanmotion. Besides, some scholars try to improve trimaran’s seakeeping
performance by changing the layout of side-hulls (Wang, Ma and Duan,2018; Nazemian, Ghadimi P, 2021; Wang, Duan, 2021; Ghadimi,
Nazemian and Ghadimi, 2019). The results show that the trimaran will
gain suitable dynamics and reduce the added resistance by reasonably
setting the side-hulls’ arrangement.

ABSTRACTThe trimaran has received increasing attention for its excellent resistanceand maneuverability. Based on the in-house ship hydrodynamics CFD
solver naoe-FOAM-SJTU, the seakeeping performance of trimaran inregular waves when Fr=0.18 is simulated. Firstly, grid convergenceverification is carried out. Then, the seakeeping performance of thetrimaran on different wavelengths is carried out by numerical methods,
and the calculation results including heave and pitch motion of trimaran
are compared with the experimental results. Studies have shown that theamplitudes of heave and pitch motion get larger with the increase ofwavelength on the whole. The numerically simulated results agreed very
well with the experimental data which the experiment work is in progress
and the report is not officially published. Their agreement shows that thenaoe-FOAM-SJTU solver can be used to predict the seakeeping
performance of the trimaran and provide data support for the design
process of the trimaran.

In addition, T-foil (Moret, Perez and Tejedor, 1993) is an effective
component in reducing the trimaran’s pitch motion and shows some goodresults by applying it on trimarans. Deng, Huang and Zhou (2014)
compared the pitch and heave motion of trimaran with and without Tfoil, and they found that the T-foil can effectively mitigate the motionsof trimaran in waves. Jiang, Bai and Liu (2022) proposed a hybrid control
strategy that has a better result in reducing the motion response oftrimaran to control the T-foil which can adjust the maximum flap angelaccording to the trimaran’s motion response. In order to further improvetrimaran’s seakeeping performance, stern-flap and T-foil are often
combined to be installed. Zheng, Liu and Yang (2021) selected the T-foiland stern-flap to study the influence of installation positions onseakeeping performance, and verify whether the appendages’ installation
positions are reasonable and effective to improve the seakeeping
performance of trimaran in waves. Zeng, Song and Zheng (2019)
designed an active controller of the appendages based on T-foil and flap,
and the experiment results show that the controller has a good effect on
trimaran’s vertical stabilization.

KEY WORDS: Trimaran; CFD; regular wave; heave; pitch
INTRODUCTION
Trimaran has become more and more popular due to its excellent
maneuverability and resistance in recent years. It consists of a main hulland two side-hulls, which leads to a larger deck area. With thedevelopment of computer technology, Computer Fluid Dynamics (CFD)
based on viscous theory has been widely applied in hydrodynamic
problems of trimarans. Compared to traditional mono-hull, thehydrodynamic performance of trimaran in waves is more complicated.
Besides, accurately predicting the motion response of trimaran in waves
is a prerequisite for trimaran’s design. However, the nonlinearity
between main hull and side-hulls is high so that the potential flow theory
is not suitable to study the seakeeping performance of trimaran.
Therefore, the computer fluid dynamics (CFD) based on viscous theoryis used to study the seakeeping performance of trimaran in this paper.

To sum up, trimaran has gradually attracted more and more scholars'attention due to its excellent seakeeping performance. However,compared with the research on resistance of trimaran, there are relatively

Unlike navigating in calm water, trimaran navigating in waves will
dissipate more energy. This additional energy consumption is called3823