Knowledge and methodology development for the analysis of air cavity ships

Research Project, 2013 – 2017

The Air Cavity Ship (ACS) concept in a displacement ship reduces the frictional resistance of the hull by replacing a large portion of the flat bottom with a shallow pressurized air chamber, hence reducing the power without losing considerable cargo capacity. Previous computational and experimental studies have shown the ability of the air cavity system to reduce the hull resistance (for Stena P-MAX series) by up to 20%, i.e. 25000 MWh/year/ship, at ideal conditions, but they also indicated that our understanding of the phenomena causing the resistance reduction to be far from the theoretical ideal (~ 35%) is not complete. Moreover, although current computational tools are sufficient for basic design work through comparative ranking of designs, they both require very demanding computational resources and are still not detailed enough to perform quantitative results helping in physical understanding of the problem. This research project is designed to help resolving these two issues.