| Abstract | Engineers carrying out parametric studies on new high speed surface ships for preliminary design purposes often have difficulty in estimating their performance from a methodical series. Most often such a series does not exist and even if it does, the data are usually classified. Whatever results are available neither cover the required range of parameters adequately, not give much information on vital performance characteristics. Responses to extreme weather conditions, which could often be of major importance in new designs, are often ignored. With this in mind, a methodical hull form series was developed jointly between IMD and the Department of National Defence and this is referred to as the NRC hull form series for Fast Surface Ships (FSS series). Further variation of this series produced an off-shoot called the Wide Beam Series (WB Series), specifically designed for relatively wide and slower speed hulls. There are altogether 43 designs for the former series, with an additional 6 for the wide beam hull form. They all have been obtained by systematic variation of non-dimensional parameters involving length, beam, draught, block coefficient and waterplane are coefficient. Comprehensive sets of resistance (including appended), propulsion and head sea seakeeping experiments have been conducted and the results have been extensively reported. Since the FSS Series is designed to run at up to a Froude number (Fn) of 0.50 in fairly severe waves, it has now been considered necessary to examine slamming in addition to overall performance in such extreme conditions. This paper briefly reviews the philosophy and parametric development of these hull form series. Regression analysis has been carried out on both series for resistance and head wave seakeeping for the main series. Such regression analysis enables design predications to be interpolated from within the matrix of models tested. A brief summary of this work is given in the paper. Some early results from the slamming experiments with the first model have also been included |
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