In this paper, a new type of high-speed craft with better performance Gliding-Hydrofoil Craft (GHC) has recently been developed in Jiangsu University of Science and Technology, China. Then a fiberglass gliding-hydrofoil craft is designed and built. Experiment method is chosen to study the rapidity of GHC. The experiment measurements show the rapidity of gliding-hydrofoil craft is improved. Meanwhile, one case of GHC is run with software FLUENT, the results show this software is fit for studying the hydrodynamics of surface ship.
With the development of marine transport, greater number of high-speed craft are being designed and operated widely. There are many applications for high-speed craft, such as the increasing requirement for high-speed craft from the maritime transport and offshore industry, because of the high speed and low cost of these types of vessels. Particularly in deeper seas where large-scale helicopter operations become expensive, high speed craft are more advantageous. In addition, the military's requirement for high-speed craft is also increasing. In many cases, military crafts need to run at high speed to fulfill their mission even in bad sea conditions.
Therefore, development of a highspeed craft for a seaway is a new challenge that is being demanded from the naval architects of today. This requires further research and investigation of various high-speed vessels. There are a wide variety of high-speed vessels in use, such as hydrofoil-supported vessels and submerged hull-supported vessels (e.g. planing craft, as shown in Fig.1.1.b). A planing hull craft is a high powered water-craft and is typically a submerged hull-supported vessel. Theoretical research on steady planing dates back to the early of 1930's. Compared with traditional displacement type vessels, planing crafts are more complicated. So, planing problems have been approximately solved by applying the basic assumption of zero-gravity, zero-viscosity and zero-compressibility.
