So as to improve the reliability and accuracy of marine simulators, it is essential to predict ship heave and pitch motions in regular waves. The motions of two ships, the international standard model KVLCC2 and the first training ship, “Yukun”, of Dalian Maritime University, are simulated using a three-dimensional (3D) numerical wave tank based on the Unsteady Reynolds Averaged Navier–Stokes (URANS) equations. The free surface is captured by the volume of fluid (VOF) method, and an SST k-ω turbulence model is used to describe the turbulence flow. The numerical model is first validated for the standard KVLCC2 at three different speeds through a comparison with the published experimental data and the potential flow results. Then, numerical simulation is performed for the motion of the ship Yukun with different speeds under various sea conditions. The heave amplitude of the hull changes with the increase in the wavelength when the maximum value is reached. Upon comparing the RAOs of ship motions under different wave steepness conditions, it is apparent that the heave and pitch motions of ships nonlinearly decrease with an increase in wave steepness. The results were added to the database of the marine simulator to further improve the accuracy and realism of the simulator.

This paper proposes a fast multigrid algorithm to simulate the non-linear motion of ships in both intact and damaged conditions. The simulations of ship motions in waves are known to require much time to calculate due to the strong non-linear interactions between ship and waves. To improve the calculation efficiency while retaining the accuracy, a prediction-correction strategy was designed to accelerate the simulation through three sets of locally refined meshes. The flow field was first estimated in a coarse mesh and then mapped to a locally refine mesh for further higher-fidelity corrections. A partitioned radial basis function (PRBF) method is proposed to interpolate and reconstruct the flow field for the refined mesh. A new two-phase flow solver was developed with a fast multigrid algorithm based on the Reynolds-averaged Navier–Stokes equations (RANSE). The new solver was applied to study the non-linear behavior of a damaged ship in beam waves and the effect of damaged compartments on ship rolling motion. Validation against the solution with the original method of single set meshes and experimental data indicates that the proposed algorithm yields satisfactory results while saving 30–40% of the computational time.