The water rise in front of a model planing hull

It is known that the water “splashes-up” or rises above the undisturbed surface immediately in front of a planing surface. This rise is greatest in front of a flat planing plate and a number of attempts have been made to reduce the experimental measurements of this phenomenon to some kind of order. Since it was first independently proposed by both Schnitzer and Smiley in 1952, all attempts to correlate the flat plate splash-up have started with the assumption that splash is only a function of the immersed length of the plate and is independent of trim angle at least below about 20°. In part, this was because the three early studies which compared this hypothesis with experimental data omitted those portions of the data which did not support the hypothesis. The present paper concludes that this forty year old hypothesis is fallacious and that the water rise in front of any prismatic planing surface is best approximated by $$\frac{d}{{\sqrt {bl} }} = k\sin ^2 {\mathbf{\tau }}$$ whered is the vertical water rise at the water/keel intersection;b is the beam;l is the submerged length of the keel;τ is the trim angle;k: is a constant determined from experiment, approximated by,k = 2e ^?2.5β , whereβ is the deadrise angle in radians. It might be thought that this is a slight contribution, of little practical import, but for one thing. Starting in the 1950's most towing tank experimenters in the United States abandoned the difficult measurement of model draft and obtained only the “actually wetted length” from underwater photographs. But theoretical planing force calculations require a knowledge of the relationship between a hull and the undisturbed water plane. Thus if modern experimental data is to be compared with theory, it is necessary to estimate what the undefined splash-up or water rise was during each experiment, in order to estimate the model's true position in space. The paper concludes by criticizing the format of some modern reports of experiments with model planing hulls and suggests that, in addition to the usual graphical presentations, measured data should always be reported numerically. Also, that when relevant data is omitted from a plot, the facts of such omission should be clearly stated.