Fidelity Fine Marine for Faster, Smarter Marine Design Decisions

Marine design engineers and naval architects increasingly rely on computational fluid dynamics (CFD) to evaluate performance earlier in the development cycle, reduce dependence on physical testing, and manage risk across complex design programs. General-purpose CFD tools can handle many of these tasks, but they often require significant setup effort and workflow customization to fit marine-specific problems. Fidelity Fine Marine is a CFD platform built specifically for marine applications, covering the core hydrodynamic and motion challenges of naval architecture within a single, purpose-configured environment.

Fine Marine has been used by Emirates Team New Zealand, INEOS Britannia, and American Magic in the America's Cup, and by teams competing in the Vendée Globe. These are programs where design margins are razor-thin, and simulation quality directly affects race outcomes, making them a useful benchmark for what the tool can do under serious engineering scrutiny. The same capabilities are available to both commercial and offshore programs, where the challenges differ but the need for simulation accuracy remains equally important.

Why Marine Engineers Are Moving Away from General-Purpose CFD

Fine Marine is relevant across a wide range of marine applications, from commercial and offshore ships to high-performance and advanced vessel design. Instead of forcing teams to stitch together a generic CFD workflow, the platform provides a marine-centered environment that shortens setup time, improves consistency, and helps engineering groups move from concept exploration to validation with less process friction. This approach reduces setup effort and improves consistency across projects, allowing teams to move more efficiently from early design exploration to validation. As a result, organizations can iterate faster, evaluate more alternatives, and align simulation efforts more directly with business outcomes such as reduced development time and increased confidence in performance predictions.

Simulating Coupled Behaviors That Actually Drive Performance

For advanced marine programs, the value of simulation lies in its ability to accurately represent how multiple physical effects interact. Engineers rarely evaluate designs based on a single metric; instead, they must understand performance across a wide range of operating conditions and development stages.

Fine Marine enables this broader perspective by capturing the coupled behaviors that drive real-world outcomes, including hull hydrodynamics, appendage behavior, aerodynamic loading, cavitation, ventilation, maneuvering, touchdown behavior, and wave performance. This allows teams to evaluate vessel performance more realistically, leading to stronger confidence in design decisions and reducing the likelihood of unexpected issues later in development.

Mesh Generation and Motion Modeling Built for Realistic Hull Geometries

Achieving accurate results should not require excessive manual effort or complex setup procedures. Fine Marine simplifies this process by giving engineers the flexibility to adapt their simulation approach to the specific geometry and requirements of each design.

By automatically concentrating computational effort where it matters most, such as around free-surface effects, pressure gradients, and critical flow regions, the platform delivers high-quality results more efficiently. This reduces turnaround time while maintaining predictive accuracy, helping teams make faster and more reliable decisions.

This capability is enabled by a combination of advanced meshing and motion technologies, including:

• Flexible unstructured meshing approaches (surface-to-volume and volume-to-surface)
• Weighted mesh deformation for small body motions
• Sliding grids for rotating components
• Overset grids for large or complex motion
• Adaptive grid refinement focused on critical flow regions
• Dedicated free-surface modeling for marine applications

Together, these features ensure that engineers can achieve precise, high-fidelity results without adding complexity to their workflows.

The Full Range of Physics in One Framework

Modern marine design programs require flexibility across both early-stage exploration and detailed validation. Fine Marine supports this by enabling engineers to evaluate both steady-state performance and complex transient behavior within a single, consistent environment.

This scalability allows teams to adjust the level of detail depending on the question they need to answer, balancing speed and accuracy without switching tools or disrupting workflows. As a result, teams can remain productive throughout the entire design cycle while making better-informed decisions.

To support this breadth of applications, Fine Marine includes a comprehensive set of physics and modeling capabilities:

• Six degrees of freedom (DOF) multi-body motion
• Turbulence modeling from laminar approaches through DES
• Cavitation and ventilation prediction
• Wave condition modeling
• Dynamic velocity prediction workflows
• Mooring and cable effects
• Pollutant dispersion
• Modal fluid-structure interaction

Together, these capabilities ensure that engineers can address a wide range of marine challenges within a unified framework, enabling more efficient workflows and more confident design outcomes.

Running Hundreds of Design Variants Without Scaling Your Team

Large-scale marine CFD programs often require hundreds or even thousands of simulation runs. Without automation, this quickly becomes a bottleneck. Fine Marine addresses this challenge by enabling automated workflows that allow teams to run complex studies more efficiently and consistently.

By reducing manual intervention and standardizing processes, organizations can significantly increase throughput without scaling engineering effort linearly. This means more design options can be explored within the same timeframe, ultimately leading to better-performing solutions.

Validated Against Towing Tanks, PIV, and America's Cup Race Programs

Simulation is only valuable when it reliably reflects real-world behavior. Fine Marine has been validated against experimental data and real operating conditions, including towing-tank tests, PIV measurements, cavitation studies, maneuvering benchmarks, and full-scale sea trials, giving engineers greater confidence in the accuracy of their results.

This level of validation allows teams to shift critical decisions earlier in the design cycle, where changes are easier and less costly to implement. It also supports more ambitious design exploration by reducing uncertainty and enabling engineers to push performance boundaries with confidence.

Is Fine Marine Right for Your Program? Here's What to Expect in the Webinar

As marine design continues to grow in complexity, success increasingly depends on the ability to act quickly and with confidence. Fine Marine helps organizations meet this challenge by enabling faster iteration, deeper insight, and more reliable predictions.

By accelerating development cycles, reducing performance risk, and maximizing engineering productivity, it empowers teams to make smarter design decisions earlier, ultimately delivering better-performing vessels in less time.

To see how these capabilities come together in practice, watch the webinar and explore how Fidelity Fine Marine is helping accelerate smarter marine design.