Experimental testing and simulations of an autonomous, self-propulsion and self-measuring tanker ship model

Improving the energy efficiency of ships has generated significant research interest due to the need to reduce operational costs and mitigate negative environmental impacts. Numerous hydrodynamic energy saving technologies have been proposed. Their overall performance needs to be assessed prior to implementation. A new approach to this evaluation is investigated at model scale which applies an approach comparable to that applied for the performance monitoring of a full scale ship. That is long duration testing that measures power consumption for given environmental and ship operating conditions and can use statistical analysis of the resultant large amount of data to identify performance gains. As a demonstration of the approach, an autonomous, self-propelled and self-measuring free running ship model of an Ice Class tanker is developed. A series of lake based and towing tank tests experiments have been conducted which included bollard pull, shaft efficiency, naked-hull, self-propulsion, and manoeuvrability tests. These investigated the efficiency improvement resulting from changing the ship operational trim and testing different bow designs. An associated mathematical model for the time domain simulation of the autonomous ship model provides an effective tool for data analysis. It has been demonstrated that the use of a suitably instrumented self-propelled autonomous ship model can provide long duration tests that incorporates the influence of varying environmental conditions and thereby identify marginal gains in ship energy efficiency.