ideas required for final year dissertation,

[challange]

Hi,


I am a yacht manufacture / surveying degree student and am struggling to come up with new, original ideas for my final year dissertation. I was hoping for some help. Can anyone suggest any real problems the industry is facing, so that I can have a go at developing a solution? It can be on anything: manufacture techniques, spars, rigging, materials, design, engineering, propulsion, foils................etc.

Any suggestions would be appreciated.

Cheers

[dougfrolich]

Develop a user friendly way to accuratly predict the bottom pressure on High speed plaining hulls, based on first principles, include slaming and dynamic stability in a varity of sea states. And relate it to the structural response of the major srtuctural elements of the design.

[mobjack68]

Hey, how about a sea-water battery??? been scratching my noggin on that one for a while and we all know sea water has great electrical potential, hmmm...remember the zinc thing??? and the first time I painted the aluminum boat with the copper anti-fouling.....Since most all sailboats need ballast and the necessary metals to create the EMF can be calculated and added as part of the ballast.....The problem with a static seawater battery is the loss of emf as the chemicals are depleted, the great thing about the "boat battery", constant supply of new chemicals!!! and the saltier the water, the greater the emf, hence a grand reason to stay close to the equator....
I think I need another beer...my head hurts
mobjack68

[Eric Sponberg]

Here are two ideas:

First: No one has ever been able to explain or quantify precisely what geometry or location that one should put lifting strakes on a powerboat (or sailing yacht) hull. This is a totally unstudied problem. If you are designing a semi-planing or planing powerboat, with hard chines, where to those chines go on the hull? Back aft this is not really a problem, but how are they shaped and where to they go on the hull going forward of amidships? I have seen strakes rise all the way to the top of the stem, and I have seen them remain close to and parallel to the waterline. What is the best location, and forward of amidships, what is the best shape? I have been proposing this question to students for 15-20 years, and no one has taken up the gauntlet.

Second idea: Which is better for a full displacement power boat--hard chines or round bottom? As far as I am aware, there has been only one definitive study of this question, published in SNAME Transactions in 1992 by Zborowski and Chu: "Hard Chine Versus Round Bottom--Comparison of stability in Waves and Seakeeping Performance of Small Displacement Ships." This was a very well intended study but it is highly flawed and not well respected. The authors admit to many of the flaws, and the results are very counter intuitive. It was solely a computerized study using an outdated and flawed computer simulation program. But it is the only modern investigation into the subject. Now it is 15 years later, and the computer software available today is very much more powerful and sophisticated. A new computer study would be most worthwhile, but also, it should be backed up by model tests. A good study would be worth a masters or doctors degree, definitely.

Eric

[RANCHI OTTO]

Eric,

there is another study from Young Chey " Model tests of a series of six patrol boats in smooth and rough water" Davidson Laboratory Report SIT-DL-63-985 October 1963 concerning chine vs round hull shape in calm and rough water.
According to these results the round model have less specific resistance at Froude vol. over 4......