The Hydromechanics Laboratory supports midshipmen education, as well as midshipmen, faculty and staff research, in the areas of naval architecture and ocean engineering. The laboratory facilities include a large towing tank (380-ft long, 26ft wide, and 16-ft deep), a small towing tank (120-ft long, 8-ft wide, and 5-ft deep), a coastal engineering wave basin (52-ft long, 48-ft wide, and 2-ft dee...

Traditionally the resistance of ships has been determined using towing tank experiments. Over the past two decades increased computational power has allowed numerical approaches to replicate and potentially start to replace towing tank experiments. This work investigates the quality of results that can be achieved using a commercial Reynolds Averaged Navier Stokes (RANS) flow solver, ANSYS CFX ...

in order to determine the stability of underwater robots, their governing differential equations of motion in vertical and horizontal planes should be investigated. for horizontal plane stability, using routh stability criterion, four hydrodynamic coefficients, including derivatives of the lateral force and vertical moment with respect to sway and angular velocity are required. these coefficien...

A procedure is proposed to perform ship hydrodynamics computations for a wide range of velocities in a single run, herein called the computational towing tank. The method is based on solving the fluid flow equations using an inertial earth-fixed reference frame, and ramping up the ship speed slowly such that the time derivatives become negligible and the local solution corresponds to a quasi st...

Initial results of an ongoing Navier-Stokes Computational Fluid Dynamics study of horizontal axis tidal current turbine hydrodynamics are presented. Part of the underlying motivation is assessing the effects of the Reynolds number on turbine performance and loads in steady and unsteady flow regimes. The study aims at a) providing initial verification and validation of Navier-Stokes CFD for stea...

During design spiral of a merchant ship or a naval vessel, it is important to perform towing tank tests in order to measure its performance either in calm water maneuvers or in waves for seakeeping performance. Also, to optimize a hydrodynamic design, towing tank tests are advantageous.This article presents the results of an applied research project. The objective of this project is to design a...

To date hydroelastic towing tank models are generally segmented, flexible backbone or hinged models which provide an extremely limited representation of the ship structure and record loads only at a finite number of locations between segments. Fully flexible “hydro-structural” models, whilst providing a more accurate structural representation are rarely used due to expense and the complicated n...

The design and construction of a small wave-sediment tank, built and instrumented for under $10,000, is described. The tank is equipped with a piston-type wavemaker, capable of producing both small-amplitude and solitary waves. The middle section of the tank contains a sediment bed appropriate for wave-soil-structure interaction and sediment transport experiments. Wave energy is absorbed by a g...

In this study, we investigated the effect of hull dynamics in shallow water on the hydrodynamic performance of rowing shells as well as canoes and kayaks. An approach was developed to generate data in a towing tank using a test rig capable of reproducing realistic speed profiles. The impact of unsteady shallow-water effects on wave-making resistance was examined via experimental measurements on...