Study on a Comprehensive Energy-Saving Sail by CFD Method

Abstract

A comprehensive energy-saving sail (CES) has been proposed in order to promote energy saving and emission reduction from shipping. Wind energy is harvested for propulsion and electrical generator at the same time by a unique structure of CES. A CFD (Computational Fluid Dynamics) code is verified by a case of arc wind sail, and it is used to simulate the pressure and velocity around the CES. The results show that the outlet velocity of air tunnel V o and wind velocity V i serve as an equation V o ≈ 1.31V i , which means the CES can effectively improve the conversion efficiency. In addition, it is found that V o increases with the tunnel diameter to some extend over which it will keep almost constant.

New insights into airfoil sail selection for sail-assisted vessel with computational fluid dynamics simulation

“…He et al 16 was primarily concerned with the aerodynamic performance of a sail by employing the wind tunnel test, and the stability of sail-assisted vessels from the perspective of stability criteria calculation. However, confined to the expensive experiment expenditure and unstable results, the wind tunnel test is generally replaced by computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulation [20][21][22][23] when selecting hard airfoil sails. Consequently, we tend to conduct fluid simulation modeling of the airfoil hard sail for the sail-assisted vessel by adopting CFD.…”