High Deadrise Stepped Cambered Planing Hulls with Hydrofoils, A Proof of Concept

This paper intends to to prove that a properly designed swept back Stepped, Cambered Planing Hull with Hydrofoils (SCPH2) can reduce the drag of the conventional reference planing hull by a considerable amount (30 percent in model scale). Taking hull 5631 of the USCG systematic series as a contemporary deep-V reference planing boat, we design a SCPH2 variant, opportunely using computational fluid dynamic techniques to address the uncertainties approximations of the Clement’s method and then tested in the large basin of the US Naval Academy Hydromechanics lab. We will show the principal hydrodynamics characteristics of the new hull typology, comparing the large amount of information obtained from high-fidelity numerical viscous free surface flow simulations with the data measured from the high quality model tests. The measurement of the drag in free attitude and the underwater photography confirm the results of the theoretical design study and the predictions made with the numerical model; at the same time the systematic experimental campaign highlights several areas of potential further improvement of the technology which are currently under investigation in a new project sponsored by ONR.