A fin/bulb/winglet CFD investigation with OpenFOAM®

The use of the CFD in the America's Cup campaigns represents one of the major innovations introduced in the last years in order to help the designers in analysing the yachts performances. The high cost of the software is one of the drawbacks that more affect this kind of analysis aside the validation of the numerical results. Recently the development of reliable CFD packages in the ambit of open source projects made these investigations affordable to the low budget companies brave enough to invest their resources in less friendly but more powerful frameworks. This work is aimed at the comparison between the experimental measures performed at the Chalmers University of Technology and the numerical results obtained using the open source viscous solver OpenFOAM® for an America's cup yacht keel. The yacht keel was investigated in two configurations: one with and one without the two winglets. A grid dependence study was made in either of the two configurations in order to get a computational grid well suited for the adopted turbulences models, which are the k-w SST and k-e.