Seakeeping of a Systematic Series of Planing Hulls

It has been almost four decades since seakeeping research on a systematic series of planing hulls has been conducted at Davidson Laboratory. Past studies have tested prismatic planing hulls, which are simplifications of real planing boat geometry. In this thesis, a seakeeping study of a systematic series of warped-bottom, USCG-designed planing hulls is presented. The models were tested in sea states 2 and 3 in spectral head seas for a range of speed and loading combinations. The primary objectives were to generate a performance database useful to designers and researchers and to compare the data to results from previously established seakeeping prediction methods. Performance trends with respect to series geometry parameters as well as model loading and speed were noted. Agreement of the experimental acceleration and added resistance data with the Savitsky / Brown prediction was found to be reasonable. It was found that the acceleration data did not match the exponential distribution using the selected time history buffering method.