Naval Ship Design

Joseph Gorski

Naval surface ship and submarine design has traditionally relied heavily on experimental testing of physical models. This design approach, however, provides limited information about the magnitude and direction of flow fields generated from sea vehicles as they operate in the turbulent waters of shallow coastal regions.

To supplement the design process, supercomputers at ARSC are used to run simulations so that the affects of maneuvering in unstable waters can be taken into account during the initial design cycle. Thus, innovative ideas are tested using computer simulations before the costly, precise-scale, 20-foot-long, operational models enter the final production stage and are tested in the towing-basin facility located near the Potomac River at the Naval Surface Warfare Center (NSWC), Carderock Division in Bethesda, MD.

Dr. Joseph Gorski is one of the lead scientists responsible for computing flow fields on naval vessels and other marine-related technology at the Propulsion and Fluid Systems Department at NSWC.

Colors represent varying values of pressure on the surface of the submarine. Blue is lowest, red is highest. The grey areas on the submarine are regions outside the color scale chosen for this particular image.

Gorski and his team use ARSC resources to solve unsteady Reynolds-Averaged Navier Stokes (UnRANS) equations to integrate computational predictive modeling into this experimental design and analysis process.

These high performance computational methods can help researchers calculate the interaction of vehicle motion with the complex characteristics of the littorals (shallow coastal regions) where choppy currents and eddies are common. Scientists use visualization techniques and time-dependent calculations to understand the complexities of ship hydrodynamics and maneuvering related to stratification, shear, and wave motion in shallow waters. Increasing confidence over the past few years in these computational models allows scientists to examine some of the complex physics that cannot be observed through experimentation alone. This research supports a variety of applications, including optimization of design and shape that meets the Navy’s requirements for new surface and undersea warfare vehicles.

State and National Resource…

The Arctic Region Supercomputing Center supports high performance computational research in science and engineering with an emphasis on high latitudes and the Arctic.

The center provides high performance computational, visualization, networking and data storage resources for researchers within the University of Alaska, other academic institutions, the Department of Defense and other government agencies. ARSC is located on the UAF main campus in Fairbanks, Alaska.

Arctic Region Supercomputing Center
PO Box 756020, Fairbanks, AK 99775 | voice: 907-450-8600 | email: