Hello, I'm a graduate in Mechanical Engineering, I'm involve in a research about using Fluent in order to analyze the flow around a ship hull. I want to analyse the free surface with VOF. Can you tell me some suggestions?

Tanks in advance Giovanni

The VOF technique is nothing new. It was first proposed by the Hirt and colegues at Loa Almos National Labs. An early code that used this for free surface flows was SOLA-VOF. You could check the US Govt. publications to get a copy of this. and the code. since then this has been improved in code called Ripple also from Los Alamos. Dr. Hirt has now a commercial code FLOW-3D that uses this technique.

Basically a funftion Fij is defines where 0<Fij<1. This represents the volume of fluid in a cell. Based on the velocities this is fonvected across the cell. Fij=0 or 1 is a full cell and a fraction is a partial cell contining the free surface.

I have forgotten some of the other details as it has been about 8yrs since I did my Ph.D. using the SOLA-VOF code. I hope this is of help.

Cheers, MIJ