Design Trade-off Analysis for High Performance Ship Hull with Air Plenums

Ship designs with captured air plenums can provide benefits of reduced resistance and improved seakeeping performance. In order to design such ships, hydrodynamics computations are needed. We have extended our boundary element method code, 3DYNAFS, to the study of multi-hulls with air plenums and to predict wave resistance in the presence of the air plenum free surface. We also utilized an Unsteady Reynolds Averaged Navier-Stokes (UnRANS) equation solver to study the viscous effects around the hull with an air plenum. We conducted parametric studies on the air plenum and hull form parameters. Through these systematic variations of design parameters, we have established trends of the total resistance, which presented very distinct characteristics depending on the Froude numbers. Lastly, we have successfully demonstrated the capability of the code in dealing with air plenums of inclined hulls. The developed code was found a very useful tool for designs of complex hull forms with air plenums.