A practical method — well suited for early ship design and hull form optimization
— for estimating the sinkage, the trim and the drag of a freely-floating common monohull ship at
moderate Froude numbers F ≤ 0.45 is considered. The sinkage and the trim are realistically
estimated via two alternative simple methods: an experimental approach based on an analysis of
experimental measurements (involving no flow computations), and a numerical approach based on a
practical linear potential-flow theory (the Neumann-Michell theory) that only requires
simple flow computations for the hull surface ΣH of the ship at rest. The drag is also estimated in
a simple way, based on the classical Froude decomposition into viscous and wave components:
well-known semi empirical expressions for the friction drag, the viscous drag and the drag due to
hull roughness are used, and the wave drag is evaluated via the Neumann-Michell theory. The drag
is more sensitive to the hull position than the sinkage and the trim. Accordingly, it must
be computed for a ‘dynamic’ ship hull surface ΣH
that accounts for sinkage and trim effects,
although the hull surface ΣH does not need to be very precise. In fact, the total drag computed
for the hull surface ΣH chosen as the hull surface ΣH predicted by the numerical approach, or as
st 1
the hull surface ΣH predicted by the even simpler experimental approach, are nearly identical.
Moreover, the drag of the hull surface ΣH and the (nearly identical) drag of the hull surface ΣH
1
a
are significantly higher, and also in much better agreement with experimental
measurements, than the drag of the hull surface Σ
