An open-source fully-automated pre-processing procedure for planing hull CFD simulations

Pursuing the industrial goals of the project SOPHYA (Seakeeping Of Planing Hull YAchts, POR FESR 2014 2020 - 1.3.b Friuli Venezia Giulia Region), in particular those aimed at reducing the time-to-results of open source CFD simulations of planing hulls, a fully automated pre-processing procedure has been developed and tested. The procedure is based on open-source tools available within the OpenFOAM library. The pre-processing time is drastically reduced making the procedure fully-automated and user friendly, still making it robust and accurate. The novelty of the mesh generation procedure stands in the selection of the best mesh among a family of grids that share the same background octree-based mesh and differ from each other for the boundary-layer cells. This procedure allows to obtain high quality meshes with reduced number of cells that in turn allows a further reduction of the time-to-result through reduction of the CPU time. In addition to the mesh generation, the developed procedure provides a ready-to-run case folder for planing hull simulations. The proposed procedure allows a marked reduction of input parameters and file edits, along with better mesh quality and reduced risk of user error. The automated procedure is fully customizable and ultimately allows users to significantly reduce both pre-processing and computation time, a key aspect in CFD investigations at the design stage.