Numerical Simulation Of Viscous Flow Around A Rowing Shell

Rowing is one of items of modern Olympics. The rowing performance relates with not only athletes' physical active ability and sport technique, but also rowing hydrodynamic performance. In order to improve rowing performance, the countries powerful in rowing enhance physical active ability and sport technique by training athletes with modern high-tech on one hand, they do research on hydrodynamic performance of rowing by Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) and optimize the hull form by theory and numerical methods on the other. The Occident owned new rowing shells in each international competition, but Chinese athletes have not our own rowing shells designed by ourselves yet. Our Chinese representative often lost gold medals because the rowing shells taken part in the international competition were bought or rented from abroad. Our physical stamina training has achieved the world first level in recent international competitions. What made failure was the rowing shells whose hydrodynamic performance had direct impact on the competitive performance. Research on the hydrodynamic performance of rowing shells by ourselves is to be a top priority task of rowing so as to make excellent performance.Traditional research on ship design needs a lot of model tests whose periods are very long, costing plenty of manpower and financial resources. Exploration and research on hydrodynamic numerical methods of ships in the past tens of years, significant development of grid techniques, databank and computer hardware makes the CFD methods change greatly in computational ability and application. The function of CFD software on analyzing performance of ship and its appendages and flow details has becoming stronger, which ultimately is fit for practical engineering application. Research on applying CFD methods to rowing shells has achieved great progress in some foreign countries, but seldom seen in open literatures. Recently china almost has few researches on performance of rowing by modern hydrodynamics methods.Numerical simulation of viscous flow around a Wigley was performed employing commercial software FLUENT by solving Reynolds-Averaged Navier-Stokes (RANS) equations in this paper, analyzing various mesh generation methods, discrete schemes, normal boundary conditions and near-wall treatments. A cell-centered finite volume method (FVM) in block-structured body-fitted grid was applied to discrete the differential equations. Convection term and diffusion term were discretized by second order upwind scheme and central difference scheme respectively. The velocity-pressure coupling was based on Semi-Implicit Method for Pressure-Linked Equations Consistent (SIMPLEC). Viscous flow around a WIGLEY was simulated with different turbulence models together with enhanced wall treatment on keeping other parameters constant. The results showed that Realizable k-εtwo equation turbulence model agree best with test data, which provide consults of turbulence model choice for simulating the viscous flow around a rowing shell.Pressure distribution on shell surface, viscous drag and viscous drag coefficient were obtained from simulating viscous flow around a single shell with FLUENT. The computational results agree well with the test data. Simultaneously, the form factor (1+k) got are closed to the results of regression formula which was analyzed from the experimental data by Scragg. Simulating the viscous flow around a rowing shell can obtain flow details that are unavailable from empirical formula. The viscous resistance, flow velocity distribution, etc. predicted performance character of rowing shell with FLUENT are promising, which is useful for rowing design.