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.

Participants

Rickard Bensow (contact)

Chalmers, Mechanics and Maritime Sciences (M2), Marine Technology

Sankar Menon

Chalmers, Mechanics and Maritime Sciences (M2), Marine Technology

Funding

Swedish Energy Agency

Project ID: 38284-1
Funding Chalmers participation during 2013–2016

Related Areas of Advance and Infrastructure

Sustainable development

Driving Forces

Transport

Areas of Advance

Energy

Areas of Advance

C3SE (Chalmers Centre for Computational Science and Engineering)

Infrastructure

Publications

More information

Latest update

2017-02-07