Experimental and computational studies were conducted on the widely studied SUBOFF submarine model enabling the benchmarking of the Australian Maritime College (AMC) cavitation tunnel for submarine model testing. This paper describes the Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) used in conjunction with the SUBOFF experiments in this study. The CFD was used to determine blockage corrections and to provide insight into the development of flow structures that are observed in the wake measurements.

The blockage correction was determined using computational domains representative of the test environment and an additional enlarged domain with a low blockage ratio. The simulations of the submarine hull in the former compared well with the uncorrected test measurements. This high level of agreement provides confidence in using the results from the simulations to correct for blockage.

These corrections allow the results obtained in the AMC cavitation tunnel to be compared with results obtained in other test facilities (e.g. the David Taylor Research Centre); which showed a high level of agreement.