Design analysis of high-speed vessel

Composite hulls, typically in fibre-glass, are commonly used for high-speed applications. Structural design of the hull requires knowledge of the stresses encountered in the dynamic environment of the sea. It is important to reliably estimate the upper limits of stresses experienced by the hull for safe design as against conservative design with excessive safety factors. Determination of stresses induced by dynamic loads is of prime importance. High-speed planing crafts experience high dynamic loads in the form of pressure peaks and slamming due to encountering waves. This paper presents a methodology to determine dynamic loads on the planing hull form when encountering external waves at high speed. The application of computational fluid dynamics provides the estimation of hydrodynamic loads on the hull form. The approach here uses overset mesh to effectively handle the visualisation of motion and to assess the dynamic effects due to the occurrence of waves and spray. Once the dynamic load distribution is known, an uncoupled fluid-structure interaction approach helps to determine the structural stresses and therefrom the design for safe loads.