Modeling of planing craft in waves

Abstract: Simulation of the planing hull in waves has been addressed during the last 25 years and basically been approached by strip methods. This work follows that tradition and describes a time-domain strip model for simulation of the planing hull in waves. The actual fluid mechanical problem is simplified through the strip approach. The load distribution acting on the hull is approximated by determining the section load at a number of hull sections, strips. The section-wise 2-dimensional calculations are expressed in terms of added mass coefficients and used in the formulations of both inertia and excitation forces in the equations of motions. The modeling approach starts from the hypothetic assumption that the transient conditions can be modeled based on those section-wise calculations. The equation of motion is solved in the time-domain. The equation is up-dated at each time step and every iteration step with respect to the momentary distribution of section draught and relative incident velocity between the hull and water and catches the characteristic non-linear behavior of the planing craft in waves.The model follows the principles of the pioneering work of E. E. Zarnick differing on model structure and in details such as the modeling of the lift in the transom area. A major part of the work is concerned with experiments and evaluation of simulations with respect to performed model tests and to published experiment data. Simulations of model tests have been performed and comparisons have been made between measured and simulated time series. The link between simulation and experiment is a wave model which is based on a wave height measurement signal. It is developed and evaluated in the thesis.The conclusions are in favor of the 2-dimensional approach to modeling the conditions for the planing hull in waves and among further studies is evaluation of simulated loads and motions to full-scale trial measurement data.