Although Aker Arctic specializes in designing ice going vessels, the open water characteristics and energy efficiency are also very important as today's icebreaking vessels are operating most of the year in open water and overall fuel economy is of key interest for the customers. Aker Arctic chose to invest in FINE™/Marine, the NUMECA CFD integrated environment for marine applications, which allows full-scale modeling of ship hulls and in-depth analysis of flow phenomena.

Aker Arctic considers NUMECA’s FINE™/Marine “one of the most advanced CFD packages for naval architects”.

We are extremely proud to share with you today what Aker Arctic Technology has to say about FINE™/Marine:

Increased quality… Aker Arctic highlights that thanks to FINE™/Marine “open water characteristics of the ship can be calculated with higher accuracy, and thus we will be able to better optimize the overall performance of the ships for our customers. With the CFD program, a calculation grid for the designed 3D ship hull model is created and then different flow phenomena around the ship hull are calculated, for instance wave profile, flow directions, velocities, pressure and turbulence. A vast amount of data is generated in a short time and this helps the design process with showing where the hull form can be improved. Model or full scale resistance of the ship hull in open water can be calculated with high accuracy, even for complex and extreme hull forms. The level of detail in calculations can be easily adjusted depending on the time available, but even full scale viscous CFD calculations can be performed as part of the normal hull form design process”.

..And benefits for customers! “The benefit for our customers is that we can easily analyze more alternatives thoroughly before open water model tests, offer varied and more comprehensive work scopes and better service. Our product quality will further increase as we can analyze vessels in detail” says Risto Kurimo, Project Manager with over 30 years’ experience in the field of ship hydrodynamics. “Also complicated issues, such as nonlinear deck wetness in waves and shallow water effects, for instance amount of squat, can be calculated and analyzed with the program”.

The whole team supervised by Mr.Kurimo is very excited about the possibilities offered by FINE™/Marine.

Mr. Nerman, a newly recruited hydrodynamics specialist, points out that this new FINE™/Marine CFD-environment has excellent graphic tools, which can be used to visualize the calculated results.

“This is a new service we offer our clients. We can now more efficiently optimize the balance of ice capabilities and open water characteristics, which mean savings for our customers” Mr.Kurimo adds “For our customers the use of the new FINE™/Marine tool means lower installed power and reduced fuel consumption and emissions during the ship operation helping to fulfill the new regulations”.