Objectives

This program aims to develop the knowledge and technology to significantly improve predictions of the effect of water quality on ship resistance and underwater radiated noise of cavitating ship propellers and pile driving for offshore wind turbines. We want to achieve a breakthrough on the following three long-standing problems in the Maritime Industry:

1. A lacking understanding of the efficacy of transitional air layers and air bubble injection on friction drag reduction and lacking procedures for reliable model tests or computational simulations.
2. A lacking understanding of the effect of water quality on propeller cavitation inception.
3. An incomplete understanding of the effect of water quality on the radiated underwater noise by a cavitating propeller and by pile driving for wind turbines.

For each of these three issues, "Water quality" refers to the dissolved and free gas content (bubbles), the chemical and particulate content of water. The economical and societal impact is that air-lubrication promises net power reductions of up to 15% of the current standard. Another impact of the proposed research is that hull vibration levels can be predicted with higher accuracy, resulting in optimization of propeller efficiency, recently shown to reduce power requirements by 10-15%.