PREDICTION OF THE TOWING FORCE GENERATED BY A KITE ATTACHED TO A KVLCC2 TANKER MODEL

References: 14th International Multidisciplinary Scientific GeoConference SGEM 2014, www.sgem.org, SGEM2014 Conference Proceedings, ISBN 978-619-7105-14-8 / ISSN 1314-2704, June 19-25, 2014, Book 3, Vol. 2, 669-676 pp

ABSTRACT
The naval industry is oriented towards a greener operation for the ships; this goal can be achieved by implementing green technology onboard vessels, even if we are not dealing with new constructions, but rather with ships that are the subject of retrofitting. By implementing during the retrofitting period technologies that aims Renewable Energy Sources, the overall efficiency of the propulsion system will be surely increased. In this paper there are carried out transient RANS – VOF simulations for the flow around a KVLCC2 tanker model which has attached a towing kite to its bow, in order to determine the additional power that becomes available when using the high altitude towing kite which is designed to decrease considerably to operating costs of a ship, by lowering the consumption rates by 10% to 35% average winds. This concept was developed to act as a supplementary power source in addition to ship’s main engine. The simulation is carried by using Ansys CFX simulation package. Attention will be given to the discretization of the convective term and the modelling of turbulence.

Keywords: towing, kite, tanker, renewable, KVLCC2