Mola, AndreaHeltai, LucaDeSimone, Antonio2012-04-032012-04-032012-03https://openscience.sissa.it/handle/1963/5669We present an innovative numerical discretization of the equations of inviscid potential flow for the simulation of three dimensional unsteady and nonlinear water waves generated by a ship hull advancing in water. The equations of motion are written in a semi-Lagrangian framework, and the resulting integro-diff erential equations are discretized in space via an adaptive iso-parametric collocation Boundary Element Method, and in time via adaptive implicit Backward Di erentiation Formulas (BDF) with variable step and variable order. When the velocity of the advancing ship hull is non-negligible, the semi-Lagrangian formulation (also known as Arbitrary Lagrangian Eulerian formulation, or ALE) of the free surface equations contains dominant transport terms which are stabilized with a Streamwise Upwind Petrov-Galerkin (SUPG) method. The SUPG stabilization allows automatic and robust adaptation of the spatial discretization with unstructured quadrilateral grids. Preliminary results are presented where we compare our numerical model with experimental results on the case of a Wigley hull advancing in calm water with fi xed sink and trim.enPreprintUnsteady ship-wave interactionNonlinear free surface problemsSemi-Langrangian formulationArbitrary Langrangian Eulerian formulationBoundary element method