Slamming Load Effects on the Bottom of High-Speed Aluminum Planing Craft

Slamming is an important design consideration for aluminum vehicles, which must endure repeated impact events when operating at high speed in waves. An experimental study of a free-falling aluminum wedge hull is presented to measure the loading conditions and structural response of the bottom plate of a high-speed planing hull. In this study, the mass of the hull was varied, and two drop heights were examined. Slamming pressures were measured using two types of sensors. Full-field strains were measured using stereoscopic digital image correlation. This paper presents preliminary results of the loading on and deformation of the bottom plating and discusses the challenges to experimentally understanding this fluid-structure interaction problem. It was found that the measurement of the hydrodynamic loading on the plate is sensitive to the type of sensor used.