Fluid-Structure Interaction of a Surface Effect Ship Bow Seal and a Free Surface

Andrew L. Bloxom and Wayne L. Neu

Aerospace and Ocean Engineering
Virginia Tech
Blacksburg, VA, 24061-0203
neu@vt.edu, abloxom@vt.edu

Introduction
Surface Effect Ships (SES) were born into the high speed marine vehicle world as a hybrid of an
air-cushion vehicle (ACV) and a catamaran. A typical SES design has a catamaran-type pair of
side-hulls with flexible seals which contain a cushion pressure provided by lift fans pumping air
into the void between the hulls. Due to the highly flexible nature of these seals and the
complex wake interactions inside the hulls, the free surface is in constant interaction with
them, causing increased drag, cushion pressure leakage, and additional material fatigue. Taking
advantage of the reduced wetted surface area achieved by lifting the hull to minimize frictional
drag, SESs are able to achieve higher speeds with less thrust. At the same time, an increase in
directional stability over a typical ACV is provided by the side hulls, as well as improved
seakeeping performance. ACVs are normally limited to favorable sea conditions due to the
likelihood of cushion pressure leakage as a result of large motions in higher wave amplitudes
[1]. The SES design allows the craft to seal the cushion pressure in along the length of the craft
hulls, but still has flexible seals fore and aft to maintain cushion pressure and allow smoother
interaction of the craft with waves.
Beginning in the 1960s, SES work largely followed a design, build, test, iterate paradigm. Much
was learned about the nature of these craft through both model tests and full scale prototype
testing which advanced the state of the art and provided a craft which was very useful in
selected missions/uses. Notable uses include high speed ferries and littoral patrol craft. Due to
the nature of the cushion pressure and twin hulls and the inability to visually observe the
dynamics inside the hulls during operation, the true nature of the free surface dynamics and
their interaction with the seals was never fully understood. An anecdote told by an early SES
designer, Bob Wilson, tells of a Navy Captain who nearly lost his life strapped to the inside of a
prototype SES in order to get a better look at the free surface dynamics inside the cushion [2]!
SES design still has some areas of open research with the potential to improve the performance
characteristics. The Office of Naval Research T-Craft tool development program was started in
2007 to address the need for advanced design capabilities to augment the design of an actual
SES for the U.S. Navy. The design concept is an SES which can transit the open ocean, then
transform into an ACV mode near shore, and deliver a payload over the beach [3]. This
program brought together researchers in industry and academia to develop the tools to aid the
design and gain understanding of some of the fundamental dynamics of SES. Figure 1 shows
Naval Surface Warfare Center Carderock Division (NSWCCD) Model Number 5887, a generic TCraft SES model with finger type bow seal. This model was tested in the Maneuvering and
Seakeeping Basin at NSWCCD to provide basic data for validation of ship motion simulations [4].
Numerical studies of SES craft have focused on the resistance and seakeeping performance of
simplified versions of the craft at varying degrees of fidelity. One common approximation had
been the simplification of the seals to rigid bodies, or not including seals at all [5]. In some
models, empirical or numerical approximations were chosen to represent the seals influence
on the overall performance of the craft [6]. Another approach that was taken modeled the seal
as a simplified hinged flap, which can respond to wave motions while still providing a more
accurate prediction of resistance and overall craft motions [7]. Only in the past decade have
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numerical codes and fluid structure interaction research provided the capability to model the
complex behavior of an air cushion vehicle seal interacting with the free surface. Some groups
focus more on reduced order modeling of craft motions and performance in order to provide
timely information to design teams [8]. Using boundary element calculations of the flow around
the ship, with models for cushion pressure and seal effect, these simulations are much less
computationally intensive than Navier-Stokes simulations which capture the finer details in the
flow. However, to capture the interaction of the seals with the craft wake, it becomes necessary
to use more advanced CFD methods. The advantage to numerical testing of SES is the wealth of
data on these interactions that can be gleaned from the comfort of a computer chair, however
the physical experiment is still very relevant in gaining insight and providing validation data to
modelers.
Model scale experiments of an SES bow seal system, which served two purposes, have been
performed by researchers at the University of Michigan [9]. The main goal was to increase the
understanding of seal dynamics through testing of a canonical SES model, and gathering the
most useful data that current state of the art sensors and instrumentation can afford. With
such data, the secondary goal was to provide numerical modelers with a valuable set of
validation runs to which they could compare the emerging results of their latest FSI codes.
Simulations of this model have been undertaken to aid in the design and understanding of the
complex dynamics that occur between the craft and the free surface which can be detrimental
to both seakeeping and powering performance. The authors attempts to model the bow seal
of the craft in a simplified model date back to 2010. These were carried out using the early
versions of the co-simulation tool between STARCCM+ v5.06 and Abaqus v6.10, in which only
an explicit coupling scheme for the force-displacement transfer was implemented. These
simulations experienced an instability with the force on the seal and its displacement when
using 2nd order time discretization in the fluid. Now, with the implementation of the implicit
algorithm in the co-simulation engine in STAR-CCM+ v7.04 and Abaqus v6.12, stable simulation
of the complex dynamics are being solved with larger timesteps and 2nd order discretization.

Physical Model Experiments

University of Michigan Bow Seal Test
The SES bow seal tests mentioned above were carried out in 2008-2009 at the University of
Michigan Hydromechanics Laboratory Towing Tank. The geometry of the rig used, shown in
Figure 2, was designed to accommodate different seal designs at the bow, and had a lobe stern
seal. A number of tests were run in which initial seal immersion, cushion pressure, seal design,
and forward speed were varied. The two seal designs selected for testing were a canonical flat
plate type seal, and a finger type bow seal design. The finger seal design shown in Figure 1 on
the NSWCCD Model Number 5887 is common in production SES, and the single flap design is
more a canonical test case. Both were constructed of 3.175 mm thick vulcanized neoprene
rubber with a fabric inner layer. The material was tested in a simple bending test to obtain a
flexural rigidity, which was used to calculate the Youngs modulus of 16.9 MPa. The density of
the material is 1096 kg/m3. The rig was instrumented with interior cushion cameras having
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good visibility of the seal and wake, taut string potentiometers to measure the seal
displacement along the centerline plane, load cells to measure the net forces where the seal
meets the craft, and blower fans to provide variable cushion pressure.
During a run, the craft was only allowed to move in the forward direction, and was held fixed in
all other directions. A typical run began with the pressurization of the cushion, then the rig was
accelerated, and data were collected once the desired test speed was attained. One run was
selected as the focus of this work, number 1058, with the flat plate type bow seal. The
conditions for this run were a velocity of 8 ft/s, cushion pressure at 2.5 inches of H 2O, and an
initial seal immersion of 9 inches. The flat plate bow seal design was chosen as the test case for
this numerical study primarily to remove the complexity of contact modeling and volume cell
deletion that would result from the interaction of the finger type seals with each other and the
SES sidewalls.

Numerical Modeling with FSI Co-simulation

When modeling such a complex physical problem, one must decide how much detail to capture
in simulation. Will the simulation follow the same test procedure as the physical model test? If
not, how should the solution be initialized? Does the physical geometry need to be simplified
in the simulation? How would such a simplification affect the fidelity of the simulation? These
are just some of the difficult issues which must be addressed in setting up the co-simulation.
Fluid Domain
The fluid dynamics side of the co-simulation utilizes the three dimensional, 2nd order, implicit
unsteady flow solver with a step size of 0.0001 seconds. The Volume of Fluid (VOF) method is
used to capture the free surface. The seal displacement calculated by Abaqus is applied to the
fluid domain through STAR-CCM+s mesh morphing scheme. Because of the inherently
expensive computational cost of running FSI simulations, every effort was made to reduce
unnecessary grid refinement while still capturing the important flow features. Isotropic volume
refinement was applied in the interior of the craft where the free surface is dynamically
responding to the pressure field produced by the craft and the cushion pressure. Anisotropic
grid refinement in the z-direction was applied throughout the entire domain to preserve the
free surface. Currently, the total number of volume cells in the domain is 418,165 and the
mesh around the craft is shown in Figure 3.
The flat plate type seal is modeled with the top of the seal pinned in place and the seal sides
fixed in the y-direction to maintain zero gap at the sidewalls. The fluid boundary contains no
gaps between the edge of the seal and the sidewall. The seal is essentially attached to the
sidewalls. This assumption leads to the necessity of fixing the seal in the y-direction with an
added boundary condition in Abaqus. This is partially justified by the test rigs inclusion of steel
stiffener bars attached across the span of the seal. These were installed to force the seal to
move in a more two dimensional manner. Other simplifications to the geometry include: all
of the internal equipment support structure was removed, air blower inlets were changed to a
single large rectangular momentum source for air inlet, the rear seal was made rigid and
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simplified in geometry, the transverse stiffeners on the bow seal were not included, and the
constraint wires to hold the seal from deflecting forward were not included.
Structural Domain
The dynamic implicit time integration procedure was used in Abaqus/Standard with an initial
increment size of 0.0001 seconds and time increment sub-cycling enabled. The default HilbertHughes-Taylor solver parameters were used to calculate the displacements using the transient
fidelity mode. This is important to this type of problem where the small time scale fluctuations
of the seal remain important. The FEA model is built using 9,464 C3D8i elements in a single thin
layer with linear elastic material model based on initial calculations for the material
characteristics of the vulcanized rubber/fabric seal material. The model is pinned along the
upper edge, and fixed in the transverse y-direction to prevent the seal from displacing away
from the sidewalls.
Co-simulation
As mentioned above, early versions of the co-simulation tool allowed only staggered explicit
coupling between the codes where the force-displacement exchange only occurs once per
coupling step. The instability that results from the use of this scheme is a result of the
continuous motion of the coupling boundary being represented in a discretized fashion, with a
grid flux term included for the surface velocity when using 2nd order time discretization. A small
displacement creates an unrealistically large pressure spike, which pushes the seal in the
opposite direction, creating a pressure spike on the other side. In this way, the pressure
response on the seal cascades out of control, until either the Abaqus solver fails to converge or
the morpher can no longer handle the severity of the displacement. In the literature, this is
referred to as the artificial added mass effect (AAME) and is a well-known instability for
staggered solution FSI problems [10, 11, 12]. Problems involving high fluid velocities,
incompressible flow, low stiffness materials, and large displacements are particularly sensitive
to the AAME. There are methods for stabilizing the explicit calculation which will be discussed
below, but the implicit coupling is the best way to retain 2nd order flow solutions which is
beneficial to the free surface capturing.
A staggered implicit coupling algorithm was first implemented in STARCCM+ in version 7.04.
This algorithm takes advantage of iterative coupling, where the force-displacement transfer is
allowed multiple passes during a step using successive substitution with adaptive underrelaxation until the calculated co-simulation displacement has converged within a given
coupling step. Currently, implicit coupling is being utilized with 5 inner iterations per exchange,
and 4 exchanges for a total of 20 inner iterations per time step. Except during periods of high
acceleration or displacement, this is sufficient to converge the co-simulation displacement and
stabilize the simulation of the highly flexible seal response. Similar methods have been shown
to be successful for the calculation of FSI problems in application to free surface flow [13].

Remeshing
Periodic remeshing of the STAR-CCM+ domain is necessary when the seal response exceeds the
limits of the mesh morpher or when degradation of grid quality becomes excessive.
Maintaining grid quality in the vicinity of the air-water interface is important to the operation of
the VOF methods High Resolution Interface Capturing (HRIC) scheme. The morpher, which is
used with default settings, does have the ability to handle large displacements. However,
because of the seals proximity to the sidewalls and the bow of the craft, the volume cells in
that region can become extremely distorted by motion of the seal. Because the HRIC
convection scheme takes into account the relative angle between the advancing interface and
cell faces, it is important to maintain grid lines which are oriented roughly with the initial grid
and calm free surface.
When the volume mesh has reached a point where the quality is no longer acceptable, the cosimulation must be halted, the volume domain boundary extracted, previous surface
representations deleted, and the new extracted boundary must be used as the new input
surface for volume meshing. To restart the co-simulation, a new Abaqus input file is required
which imports the previous state of the seal, and initializes the remeshed volume domain with
the Abaqus displacements from the previous step. The remeshing frequency should be higher
near the beginning of the co-simulation as the seal makes a large displacement away from the
initial geometry. The fluctuations about a steady running displacement of the seal will be less
significant, and will not require a large number or remeshing operations. The deformation of
the grid and the resulting remeshed grid for two instants in time are shown in Figure 4. Here it
can be seen that the remeshing is much more critical at the beginning as the cells become
highly distorted when the seal displaces away from the initial condition.

Results
Explicit Coupling
Simulations of the bow seal on an SES present a slew of challenges to the FSI modeling
framework. The physical problem contains all the prerequisites for experiencing the AAME in
simulation. With explicit coupling, many approaches were taken to try to achieve a stable
solution. One of the most important aspects lies in the initial conditions where the coupling is
to start. The added mass instability is highly apparent when the seal co-simulation is started at
a condition where the fluid flow is not in a converged state. For example, a typical initial
condition in the fluid domain has full forward speed of the craft initialized on both sides of the
immersed seal. Starting a co-simulation at this point with the explicit solver will never be stable.
Instead, freezing the co-simulation solver and morpher while running the fluid solution to a
point where the force on the seal stabilizes provides an improved initial condition.
Since initial conditions alone could not stabilize the transient solution, additional techniques
suggested in [14] were utilized. Grid flux under-relaxation, material damping in Abaqus,
artificial compressibility in the fluid, reduced time steps, pressure ramping, pressure clipping
and use of 1st order time discretization in the fluid are the primary means by which to stabilize
5

the solution. Of those, the grid flux under-relaxation and 1st order time discretization were
utilized more heavily in these efforts. Grid flux under-relaxation effective in some problems
where a steady state is being sought out, however in the case of an problem with a free
surface, neglecting the grid flux terms can impact the convection of volume fraction through
the morphing grid. This result makes under-relaxing the grid flux terms undesirable. Figure 5
presents a comparison of the drag force on the seal during the initial stage of an explicit and
implicit co-simulation with the 2nd order time discretization and a time step of 0.0001 seconds.
Note the signature reversing of the forces with the motion of the seal which is indicative of the
artificial added mass effect.
Implicit Coupling
The implementation of the implicit coupling algorithm with iterative force-displacement
exchange has eliminated the necessity to apply stabilizing techniques. Co-simulations of the FSI
of the bow seal and free surface are now realizable with good initial conditions and proper
selection of the solver parameters. These include the number of inner iterations, the number of
inner iterations per exchange, the individual time steps for each code, and the coupling step. In
this case, 20-30 total inner iterations per time step are used with 5 inner iterations per
exchange, resulting in 4-6 total exchanges. The fluid time step and coupling step are 0.0001
seconds, and the structural time step is 0.0001 seconds with sub-cycling enabled.
The first step is acquiring a good initial condition to start the co-simulation. The authors best
practice has been to freeze the co-simulation and morpher solvers, then calculate the fluid
solution for 1-3 seconds until the initial constant velocities have been relaxed and the force on
the seal reaches a stable value. At this point the solution fields are kept and used as the new
initial condition, with the simulation history up to that point deleted. Using this method has not
required the use of any of the stabilization techniques like pressure ramping or grid flux underrelaxation. In Figure 5, the implicit coupling solution stabilizes nicely as compared to the explicit
calculation.
Figure 6 shows the displacement of the seal after 0.27 seconds of co-simulation and the
resulting free surface profile. The seal has bulged outward in the middle due to the cushion
pressure acting on the inner face, and the bottom of the seal is deflecting inward because of
the hydrodynamic loads. By allowing the solution to run with the co-simulation frozen, the aft
side of the seal becomes un-wetted due to forward speed and the flow separation at the tip.
This is an advantage when dealing with the added mass effect, since the seal does not have to
interact with water on the aft side, experiencing physical added mass effects. Ideally, the start
of the co-simulations should mimic the experimental test runs with a stationary craft, then
adding cushion pressure, and ramping up the craft velocity to the test condition. However,
since the seal eventually becomes un-wetted on the aft side there should be no issue with this
approach.

Conclusion
The simulation of a flexible bow seal on a SES has been produced using the co-simulation tool
for coupling STAR-CCM+ and Abaqus. A thin flexible flap hangs between the sidewalls of the
craft which together contain the cushion pressure which is provided by a momentum source
model representing the blower fans. The seal is acted on by both the interior cushion pressure
on the inner surface, and the hydrodynamic loads on the wetted side as the craft moves at
forward speed.
Early work, using the explicit coupling scheme, was unable to successfully model the
displacement of the bow seal due to the instability inherent in this problem. Current work,
using the newly-available implicit coupling scheme, is simulating the bow seal interacting with
the free surface at full forward speed. Future work must be completed to better characterize
the highly flexible rubberized fabric materials in the FEA model, create a Java macro routine for
remeshing the fluid domain based on cell quality metrics, and include more of the physical
features of the experiment which are not currently being modeled, such as the transverse
stiffener bars on the seal.

Figures

Figure 1: NSWCCD Model Number 5887, generic T-Craft SES model with finger type bowl seal
(top). A view of the underside of the craft showing the bow seal, transverse mid-cushion seal,
and stern seal (bottom). [4]

Figure 2 - The full geometry of the University of Michigan bow seal test platform. The flat plate
bow seal on the left side in light purple, the calm free surface is shown in light blue. [9]

Figure 3 The initial volume mesh of the model has 418,165 cells. Volume source refinement
was applied for resolving the free surface, as well as additional refinement near the bow seal to
ensure the fluid boundary will be able to morph along with the Abaqus displacement.

Figure 4 The mesh must be periodically remeshed to preserve the solution quality and ensure
the VOF method has a quality grid to capture the free surface. Left hand figures are prior to
remeshing, right hand figures are after remeshing.
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Seal Drag Force (lbf)

250
225
200
175
150
125
100
75
50
25
0
-25 0
-50
-75
-100
-125
-150
-175
-200

100 200 300 400 500 600 700 800 900 1000 1100 1200 1300

Explicit

Implicit

Inner Iterations
Figure 5 A comparison of the drag force time histories on the seal for both the implicit and
explicit coupling algorithms for t = 0.0001 s and 2nd order time discretization in the fluid.

Figure 6 - A contoured isosurface highlights the free surface elevation surrounding the craft and
the co-simulation nodal displacement is shown on the diagonal seal at the bow on the right side
of the figure.

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