Experimental Investigation of Roughness Effect on Ship Resistance Using Flat Plate and Model Towing Tests

Abstract

Towing tests on a thin flat plate of 3-mm thickness and on a ship model in smooth and rough condition were performed and extrapolation to ship scale was attempted. A newly designed experimental setup was constructed for the examination of the thin plate. The experiments on smooth flat plate included examination of a series of trip wires for flow stimulation, among which the optimum was 1.3 mm. In rough condition, the plate was covered with sandpapers of 40 and 80 grit. Both calculated roughness functions exhibited Nikuradse behavior, verifying the validity of the experiments. The equivalent sand roughness height was 1.7 times the average sandpaper roughness, as calculated by the Schlichting diagram for sand-roughened plates. Both roughness functions indicated transitionally rough regime, except for the last two data of the rougher sandpaper that lay on the fully rough regime. The results were extrapolated to ship scale using Granville method. Extrapolation of smooth model results in ship scale revealed that the traditional Froude method predicts higher resistance coefficient compared to the International Towing Tank Conference (ITTC) 78 method. Rough model results were extrapolated to ship scale by applying a newly proposed extrapolation method, using Schlichting resistance formula for rough plates as the friction correlation line, according to Froude method and for two length scales, namely the plate and ship length. The two versions of the proposed extrapolation method provided an upper and lower limit for the predicted rough hull total resistance coefficient.