Artificial Boundary Method for Calculating Ship Wave Resistance

The calculation of wave resistance for a ship moving at constant speed near a free surface is considered. This wave resistance is calculated with a linearized steady potential model. To deal with the unboundedness of the physical domain in the potential flow problem, we introduce one vertical side as an artificial upstream boundary and two vertical sides as the artificial downstream boundaries. On the artificial boundaries, a sequence of high-order global artificial boundary conditions are given. Then the potential flow problem is reduced to a problem defined on a finite computational domain, which is equivalent to a variational problem. The solution of the variational problem by the finite element method gives the numerical approximation of the potential flow around the ship, which was used to calculate the wave resistance. The numerical examples show the accuracy and efficiency of the proposed numerical scheme.