Published in: Proceedings of conference ICANOE 2023

Authors: Joseph Prabhu, Kalyanam Shanmukha Srinivas, Ram Kumar Joga and Sharad Dhavalikar

Date of Publication: 3-4, Nov-2023

The air flow characteristics on a ship’s flight deck i.e. airwake can have significant consequences for aircraft operations on ship hangar. These flow conditions can impose certain operating limitations for the aircraft. Airwake can be predicted by Wind Tunnel Model Tests (WTT). However, limitations on model size for WTT, scaling issues of model scale to full scale and requirement of huge number of cases for arriving at optimal design of superstructure demands numerical simulations. Numerical techniques based on Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) are well matured and utilized to predict ship airwake. The simulated data of flow field on the flight deck using CFD can potentially be used for the selection of the aircraft, optimizing the design of superstructure, deriving Ship - Helicopter Safe Operating Limits (SHOL) and also be used to improve the fidelity of flight simulators used for training.  To use the CFD data, validation studies are to be performed for fine tuning the CFD model in accordance with available experimental results, e.g. based on WTT and perform full scale CFD simulations.  In the present work airwake predictions are performed using CFD on a Simple Frigate Ship (SFS2). Initially the CFD model is validated against the available WTT data.  Steady and unsteady state simulations are performed to find the variation in the results. Various turbulence models are investigated for simulations with model scale for various flow regimes. Vortices separated off the top of the hangar and reattached flow on the flight deck is verified.