TriSWACH Small Model Testing

The ACCeSS community is interested in understanding the capabilities of the Trimaran-Small Water Plane Area Center Hull (TriSWACH) ship concept and the future use of this concept for the United States Navy. The aim of this project was to conduct resistance, sinkage, trim, and seakeeping tests for a variety of sidehull configurations on the TriSWACH model constructed at Webb Institute, in the Naval Academy's 120ft tow tank facility. Calm water and limited regular wave testing was previously completed at Webb institute and Steven's Institute of Technology, but irregular wave tests had not been performed. This project conducted calm water resistance tests for selected sidehull locations, varied transversely and longitudinally, to correlate with data from previous testing at Webb Institute. To gather the data necessary to study the effects of interference between the hulls, the centerhull and the sidehulls were tested separately. To observe the effect of splayed sidehulls, calm water resistance tests were conducted with the sidehulls splayed 0.5 and 1.5 degrees outboard. Calm water resistance tests were also conducted using sidehulls with double the displacement of the original sidehulls. Regular wave tests at Froude no. 0.3-0.5 and irregular wave tests in sea state 4-5 were completed for selected sidehull configurations. The tow tank data collected can validate CFD hull form optimization tools as well as support powering predictions for the TriSWACH design.
The original document contains color images.