CFD Analysis for a Ballast Free Ship Design

Shipping transfers approximately 3 to 5 billion tonnes of ballast water internationally each year. This ballast water transferred between different ports is a serious environmental problem. There are many marine species like bacteria, small invertebrates and the eggs, etc., that are carried in ship’s ballast water which are small enough to pass through a ship’s intake at ports and when discharged, lead to severe ecological problems. To overcome this, a concept of ballast free ship has been developed in which ballast water exchange and treatment is avoided by providing flow-through longitudinal pipes in the double bottom instead of conventional ballast tank. During the design of the ballast free ship, different hull forms have been generated with various hull shapes of the vessel which have been studied with regard to hydrodynamic behaviour. Finally one hull form has been selected for further study. The present work aims to estimate the penalty on resistance using CFD techniques using SHIPFLOW® software. These results are validated by model experiments for the conventional and the proposed ballast Free form at loaded and ballast drafts in the Hydrodynamics Laboratory of the Department of Ocean Engineering and Naval Architecture, IIT Kharagpur.