Old ships sail again – in 3D

To see archaeological ship finds sailing again is a rare possibility in maritime archaeology. Now, however, the Norwegian Maritime Museum (NMM) has an exciting new opportunity to do just that, thanks to the Orca3D Marine CFD (computational fluid dynamics) simulation software developed by Simerics and Orca3D. CFD will allow us to analyse the performance of the ships excavated in Bjørvika, Oslo, as they move through the water.

Digital 3D model of the ship find Barcode 2. Soon we'll be able to see her sail - digitally! Norsk Maritimt Museum

The museum’s archaeological documentation and boat building labs have worked together on a number of ship finds from Bjørvika in recent years, resulting in nine scale models (both physical and digital) and two full-scale reconstructions (a third is currently under construction). Until now, the costly and time-consuming process of first building a full-scale reconstruction, then performing sail trials, has been the only way for us to accurately judge the vessels’ performance on water. With Orca3D Marine CFD, we now have the possibility to do perform similar trials digitally. The NMM is grateful to Orca3D and Simerics for the opportunity to test our archaeological reconstructions in this manner, and we look forward to sharing our results with the public as testing gets underway.

Simerics press release

Contacts:

Rich Moore
rich.moore@simerics.com
978.376.1763

Bruce Hays
sales@orca3d.com
410.604.8011

Sarah Fawsitt
sarah.fawsitt@marmuseum.no