Hydrodynamic study of the influence of bulbous bow design for an Offshore Patrol Vessel using Computational Fluid Dynamics

The resistance of a ship is of vital importance in giving greater viability to the development of a design project, since at lower ship resistance, the power demand to achieve a desired design speed will be lower which will reduce the amount of power to be installed in the ship resulting in lower fuel consumption. The use of computational fluid dynamics to analyze and optimize hull form and its appendages permits the hydrodynamic performance of the ship to be improved from the early design stages, allowing improvements to the hull shape and appendages. This paper shows a qualitative analysis which was performed to reduce the resistance of the OPVMKII (Second Generation Offshore Patrol Vessel) in its preliminary design stage by means of designing and integrating three types of bulbous bow with the ship´s hull and analyzing the resistance curves obtained using computational fluid dynamics.