The Increasing Use of Visualization in Ship Hydrodynamics

Flow field visualization is an important part of the study of fluid dynamics and ship hydrodynamics. The field of computational fluid dynamics has provided an unprecedented ability to explore the hydrodynamics of marine vehicles through visualization. Many examples of this exist in the literature for steady flow field situations. However, unsteady visualization provides both challenges and opportunities to extract meaningful physical insight and information from computational simulations. This paper discusses some of these issues along with approaches being pursued to obtain adequate flow field information using remote high performance computing resources as well as concurrent visualization using local resources. A number of examples of flow field computations being pursued are discussed including: cavity flow, ship roll motions, trailing edge vortex shedding, ballast water exchange and crashback