CFD estimation of a resistance coefficient for an egg-shaped geometric dome

Abstract

In aquaculture, new production technologies are under development and testing. One promising type of technology is the closed floating cage. Egget® is one of these newly developed technologies, which is egg-shaped and vertically floating. One of the challenges is to determine hydrodynamic loads. Therefore, this study focuses on estimating the resistance and the resistance coefficient for steady flow with various velocities and Reynolds numbers on a scaled model. It includes simulations using Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) for two depths and experiments in the MarinLab at Western Norway University of Applied Sciences (HVL). As the cage is partially submerged, the simulations are performed using the Volume of Fluid (VOF) technique for modeling free surface flow. The comparison of experimental and simulation results show good agreement.