The Phenomenon of Friction Resistance Due to Streamwise Heterogeneous Roughness with Modified Wall-Function RANSE

Abstract

Surface roughness can reduce the performance of a system of fluid mechanics due to an increase in frictional resistance. The ship hull, which is overgrown by biofouling, experiences a drag penalty which causes energy wastage and increased emission levels. The phenomenon of fluid flow that passes over a rough surface still has many questions, one of which is the phenomenon of frictional resistance on heterogeneous roughness in the streamwise direction. In the ship hull, biofouling generally grows heterogeneous along the hull with many factors. RANSE-based Computational Fluid Dynamics was used to investigate the friction resistance for heterogeneous roughness phenomenon. The modified wall-function method represented equivalent sand grain roughness (ks) and a roughness function were applied together with k-epsilon turbulence model to simulate rough wall turbulent boundary layer flow. As the heterogeneous roughness, three different ks values were denoted as P (ks = 81.25\xa0μm), Q (ks = 325.00\xa0μm) and R (ks = 568.75\xa0μm), and they are arranged by all possible combinations. The combined roughness, whether homogeneous (PPP, QQQ, or RRR) and inhomogeneous (PQR, PRQ, QPR, etc.), results in unique skin friction values. The step-change in the height of the heterogeneous roughness produced a sudden change in the local skin friction coefficient in the form of overshoot or undershoot, followed by a relaxation where the inhomogeneous local skin friction is slowly returning to the homogeneous local one, which was explained in more detail by plotting the distribution of the mean velocity profile near the step-up or step-down. The order of roughness arrangement in a streamwise heterogenous roughness pattern plays a key role in generating overall skin friction with values increasing in the following order: PQR\xa0<\xa0PRQ\xa0<\xa0QPR\xa0<\xa0QRP\xa0<\xa0RPQ\xa0<\xa0RQP. Those inhomogeneous cases with three different values of ks can be represented by a single value (being like homogeneous) by the calculations provided in this paper.