Measurement of flows around modern commercial ship models

To document the details of flow characteristics around modern commercial ships, global force, wave pattern, and local mean velocity components were measured in the towing tank. Three modern commercial hull models of a container ship (KRISO container ship = KCS) and of two very large crude-oil carriers (VLCCs) with the same forebody and slightly different afterbody (KVLCC and KVLCC2) having bow and stern bulbs were selected for the test. Uncertainty analysis was performed for the measured data using the procedure recommended by the ITTC. Obtained experimental data will provide a good opportunity to explore integrated flow phenomena around practical hull forms of today. Those can be also used as the validation data for the computational fluid dynamics (CFD) code of both inviscid and viscous flow calculations. Received: 26 September 2000/Accepted: 22 May 2001