PRACTICAL COMPUTER PROGRAMME FOR SHIP-WAVE DRAG INVESTIGATION OF ULTRA LARGE CONTAINER CARRIER

Abstract

Wave drag is referred as the energy loss caused by the waves created when the vessels move through the water, which is also known as a wave-making resistance, RW. It is a component of ship’s resistance associated with the expenditure of energy spends by the engine in moving the body of the ship. It is a crucial effort to investigate the drag produced during preliminary design stage. Prediction using computer programme is one of the methods that could significantly give a fast and quick output at the preliminary stage. This paper is aimed to discuss the output of wave-making resistance computational programme, using MATLAB. The Holtrop and Mennen prediction method is applied and a 397m length Ultra Large Container Carrier (ULCC) is used in this investigation as a case study. The output is compared with the results produced by a commercial Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) code at various ship speed. This CFD code SHIPFLOW computed the flow and the pressure distribution around the hull, thus the wave-making resistance of systematically varied speed were computed for validation purpose.