Research on Energy-Saving Optimization of Different Formation Configurations Based on Four Catamarans

Nowadays, sailing in formation has been the major trend with the rise of unmanned ships. In the past, research about unmanned catamaran formation were more focused on algorithmic control, but the changes in hydrodynamic performance and energy are often overlooked. In nature, various collective behaviors indicate that followers would obtain significant energy consumption from beneficial interaction in certain formation configurations. Based on the previous research, the high-speed catamaran delft-372 was chosen as the basic numerical model in this paper. Four ship’s formation configurations (tandem, “trimaran”, and rectangle formations) are proposed to analyze the influence on the hydrodynamic performance of each ship, based on the Reynolds Averaged Navier-Stokes (RANS) method in combination with the Shear Stress Transport (SST) k-ω turbulence model. Through comparative analysis, it can be seen that the resistance and motion of the following ships have been optimized under specific formation configurations, but the impact of various formation configurations is quite different. In terms of single ship’s energy preservation, the last following ship of “trimaran” formation has the best performance. For the whole, tandem formation is the optimal fleet configuration. In conclusion, the hydrodynamic performance of four catamarans in different formation configurations has been studied, which can provide some reference significance.