Numerical simulation of progressive flooding of a ship after damage

The survivability of a ship, in case of flooding following damage, is a quest which occupies the maritime community for more than one century now. The flux of flood water in ship’s complex internal compartmentation is influenced by various factors and has a substantial impact on ship motion. Scientists and engineers, trying to understand and to take practical decisions during the design process, have developed simplified models with questionable assumptions and simplifications of this complex hydrodynamic problem. One commonly used approach for the evaluation of the survivability performance of a vessel against damage is the hydraulic analysis of the water inflow and propagation. This research investigates the flooding of the ITTC benchmark model, a box shape barge with a simplified internal geometry. For the numerical simulations are used a commercial high fidelity computational fluid dynamics tool and a simplified hydraulic model. The aim of this work is the understanding of the flooding process and the ensuing flooding moments, as well as the qualification and quantification of the impact of the various physical assumptions that the existing models incorporate. The parameters under investigation are the size of the damage, air compressibility, flow chracteristics and internal arrangement.