Gusto MSC and Siemens Digital Industries Software

GustoMSC is leading the design and engineering of components for the offshore industry, using CFD simulations as a key factor to keep that position in a growing and demanding market while respecting operability and operating costs. Gompute together with Siemens Digital Industries Software provides GustoMSC with a flexible solution enabling their engineering team to cover peak demands with a ready-to-use simulation platform built for HPC workloads.
We find the use of Gompute as a cloud computing resource very convenient, especially if you don’t want to invest in any local HPC hardware.

Jan-Willem Krijger, CFD Engineer

Business Challenge

CFD is used by GustoMSC to minimize the calm water resistance and improve propulsive efficiency. Further wind and current loads, thruster-hull and thruster-thruster interactions to improve the dynamic positioning capabilities are investigated.
Because most of our offshore units are sailing relatively slow (low Froude number) models use a large amount of computational cells for calm water resistance calculation and including the thrusters for a propulsion calculation increases the complexity dramatically.

The Solution

GustoMSC has been using  Star-CCM+® since 2011 due to it’s user friendliness, which results in very fast turnaround times.
They often investigate complex offshore units with a lot of appendages, for example spudcans in case of a jack-up or a moonpool in case of a drillship, so there is a need to have a user friendly and robust CFD solver.
Gompute is used as a cloud computing resource mainly for very large and complex computations, for example full scale calculations, to relief in house capacity. This allows Gusto to have a back-up for continuity purposes.

”On our in house cluster we typically don’t use more than 64 cores. On the Gompute resources we use 128 cores for similar cases. Not surprisingly, the calculations finished in about half the time.”
Jan-Willem Krijer, CFD Engineer

Benefits

We are investigating the propulsion in much more detail, resulting in more complex computational models. Gompute gives us the opportunity to investigate the thruster interactions for a drillship with all 6 thrusters operating. More recently we investigated the possibility for a drillship to use all four aft thruster for propulsion. We modelled the propeller, of the thruster, with an actuator disc and defined the thrust of the actuatordisc as a function of the massflow through the nozzle. This enabled us to capture all the thruster interactions and find the proper operating point of each thruster.

”From the moment we ordered, it took less than a week to get up and running on the Gompute resources”

Ton Lousberg, IT Manager