Help Needed with College Design Project

[DukeBoatTeam07]

Hi! We are a group of seniors at Duke University in Durham, NC majoring in Mechanical Engineering. For our senior capstone design project, we have decided to design and build a working prototype of a drag reduction system for boat hulls that uses air injected under the hull to reduce hydrodynamic drag.

As part of our preliminary design research, we are required to survey consumers and we were hoping that you would take a minute to fill out a short, 4 question survey. The survery can be found at:

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.asp?u=43173268261

Thank you so much for your assistance.

Becca, Cameron, Mike, and Frank
Mechanical Engineering, Duke University, Class of 2007

[LostInBoston]

As in Surface effect ships? check out the seacoaster http://www.seacoaster.com/
Or are you looking for something like a stepped hull, ventilated stepped hull or catamaran?

NU MET '06

[Eric Sponberg]

Hi Guys,

You do not state what type of boat you are designing this system for--sail or power. I designed an air lubrication system for my open class 60 sailing yacht design, Project Amazon. It worked. In the process of designing it, I consulted with Steve Pettingill who skippered Hunter's Child around the world in the 1994-95 BOC single-handed race around the world. His system was designed by Lars Bergstrom (now deceased) whom we also hired to work on our system (he put it in the right fore-aft location, and I did the engineering and final design). Steve had some success with it, although it would work only at planing speeds, which was not very often during the race. Because of the type of construction on Hunters Child's round bottom hull, the system actually created a bit of extra drag at speeds below planing speed. On Project Amazon, which had a flat deadrise bottom, it worked remarkably well, and it was designed to not cause extra drag at slower speeds. The details of the system were published in my technical paper "Project Amazon: An Open Class 60 Sailboat for Single-handed Round-the-World Racing", published in Marine Technology, Vol. 37, No. 2, Spring 2000, Society of Naval Architects and Marine Engineers. I can email you a complete PDF file of the paper if you send me your email address. That goes for anybody out there. You may respond directly to me at ewsponberg@sponbergyachtdesign.com.

Good luck on your project!

Eric