Ship staff wind comfort and wind safety in the walkways of containerships and case study for a feeder containership

ABSTRACT

This paper presents the investigation of wind speeds on the walkways of a feeder container ship with 3D steady RANS CFD simulations and examining them in terms of wind comfort and safety. Wind velocity profiles on walkways are studied by simulating a steady ship speed of 17 knots (8.75 m/s) with different atmospheric wind directions and atmospheric wind speeds. Wind velocities up to 21.8 m/s were measured by numerically simulating the walkways on the ship. Especially winds that coming from bow directions may create higher effective wind velocity values on the walkways even if the atmospheric wind velocities on the ship deck are low, the effective wind velocity which is combined with the airflow due to the speed of the ship at some wind directions can exceed 10 m/s. Compared to a flat bare deck, structures around walkways can reduce the effective wind speed by up to 70%.

KEYWORDS:

• Computational fluid dynamics (CFD)
• wind safety
• ship aerodynamics
• naval wind environment

Acknowledgements

The authors gratefully acknowledge the high-speed computing laboratory of Naval Architecture and Marine Engineering Department, Karadeniz Technical University.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).