ESRDC Ship Notional Baseline Medium Voltage Direct Current (MVDC) Architecture Thermal Simulation and Visualization

This work presents a fast visualization and thermal simulation tool developed as part of the Electric Ship Research and Development Consortium (ESRDC) funded by the Office of Naval Research (ONR) that is capable of providing quick responses during early stages of ship design. The tool allows for the visualization of thermal and electrical loads, and equipment locations and other variables of interest in the all-electric ship, proceeding to the computation of the resulting whole ship temperature and relative humidity distribution. For that, a previously developed simplified physical model [1-3] – which combines principles of classical thermodynamics and heat transfer, resulting in a system of three-dimensional differential equations which are discretized in space using a three-dimensional cell centered finite volume scheme – is enhanced to include fresh and sea water cooled systems throughout the ship. Therefore, the combination of the proposed simplified physical model with the adopted finite volume scheme for the numerical discretization of the differential equations is called a volume element model (VEM). A 3D simulation is performed in order to determine the temperature distribution inside the ship for the baseline Medium Voltage Direct Current (MVDC) architecture, and representative operating conditions are analyzed. VisIt visualization tool [4] is used to plot the results.