Vertical water entry of a 3-D fuselage:Comparison between a potential-flow multisection approach and a fully 3-D CFD solution

This paper proposes the analysis of the hydrodynamic behaviour of the vertical water entry of a scaled fuselage. The investigation is carried out with a low-fidelity multisection approach which exploits a 2-D fully non-linear potential flow solver based on a hybrid boundary element method-finite element method (BEM-FEM) approach. The problem is also investigated through a high-fidelity computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulation by using the open-source CFD library OpenFOAM. The aim is to compare the prediction obtained by the potential-flow multisection approach with those obtained by the 3-D CFD solution, in order to highlight the advantages and limitations of the former, which represents an approximated solution of the fully 3-D problem.