Resistance and wake prediction for early stage ship design

Abstract

Before the detailed design of a new vessel a designer would like to explore the design space to identify an appropriate starting point for the concept design. The base design needs to be done at the preliminary design level with codes that execute fast to completely explore the design space. The intent of this thesis is to produce a preliminary design tool that will allow the designer to predict the total resistance and propeller wake for use in an optimization program, having total propulsive efficiency as an objective function. There exist design tools to predict the total resistance and propeller wake, but none that provide adequate computational times for the preliminary design stage. The tool developed uses a potential flow solution coupled with an integral boundary layer solver to predict the viscous resistance and propeller wake. The wave drag is calculated using a modified linear theory, thus eliminating the need to run fully three-dimensional free surface CFD codes. The tool developed is validated against published Series 60 test data.