The "Hull Vane" Concept

Discussion in 'Boat Design' started by Earl Boebert, Aug 27, 2014.

  1. Earl Boebert
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    Earl Boebert Senior Member

  2. gonzo
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    gonzo Senior Member

    The claims and drawing seem to contradict each other. For example, if the foil has to be installed deep in the water to prevent it from coming out while pitching, then it is in clean flowing water and not in the turbulent area where the gains are suppose to happen. There is no data to substantiate their claims and it reads like sales hype.
     
  3. Doug Lord
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    Doug Lord Flight Ready

  4. tspeer
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    tspeer Senior Member

    Paul Bieker has been using a similar concept on International 14s for more than a decade.
    AFAIK, Bieker designs have won all but one I14 world championship since 1999.

    Monkey Marine (UK) rudder:
    [​IMG]

    Japanese I14
    [​IMG]
     
  5. Rurudyne
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    Rurudyne Senior Member

    Suggested, but seemingly never implemented from what I've read, paravanes for a stern wheel craft were to perform this very function, redirecting water from under the boat to better meet the wheel and, subsequently, helping to direct the flow away from the wheel to provide more thrust.

    It would seem possible that maybe feathering paddle wheels took up enough slack so that people designing them didn't worry too much about it or else that those cranking out radial wheel designs probably didn't much care (or else they would use feathering wheels).

    For side wheel boats paravanes might have performed a more useful feature of helping compensate for the bow wave, but as with bulbous bows I'm guessing that it was soon realized that this would only work best for a limited range of speeds and besides that the paravanes, sticking out as the would be, possibly even unsupported as one end, would be fragile bits of fuss.

    What Gonzo said really rings true to me. A vane that is not adjustable (for depth and maybe even angle of attack) may be of questionable value in conditions one might expect. One that is adjustable may be mighty pricy. Of course, these may be going on boats where the only old salts are in the shakers so no need to worry much about bad weather....
     
  6. PAR
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    PAR Yacht Designer/Builder

    I have a patent on a similar arrangement and some experience in this avenue of pursuit. My setup allows a fairly trim/light displacement craft, to exceed it's theoretical LWL imposed speed limits by a surprising amount. The wake is dramatically affected, permitting much higher speed in no wake areas, but across the full range of speed potential, it's pretty limited as a fixed foil. This attribute was desirable for the vessel I developed it for (river cruiser), though I doubt much more, without considerably more convolution.

    If you have a single fixed foil, you have a limited range of effectiveness, as you'd imagine, but if you can articulate this foil, you can increase it's effective range, but this is the butt kicker, as you have to computer control this puppy, in anything more than a dinghy. Forces alone will require considerably more leverage than a hand twisted wand type of control, as seen on some foiling dinghies. I have tried a flap arrangement to help ease these loads, but the more you improve it, the more complex everything about it becomes. You can also control angle of incidence with a second foil, which has more incidence, mounted forward of the other, but now you've doubled the complications and placed turbulence before the props. I had some success with widely spaced foils, where the lead foil would stall before the aft foil, keeping the aft foil engaged, but as you'd expect this has it's pitfalls as well.

    One of these days I'll have a budget to play with actuators, some sensors and controls, which is what a system like this needs. On vessels that remain at fixed speeds much of the time, such as commercial traffic and displacement cruisers, there's some hope, other wise . . .
     
  7. Rurudyne
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    Rurudyne Senior Member

    "the more you improve it, the more complex everything becomes."

    Sounds like some law about the workload of a project, nominally a government one, expanding to occupy all the available resources. :D
     
  8. PAR
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    PAR Yacht Designer/Builder

    Good point. You think the natural evolution of things would be to simplify the contraption, while improving it's abilities and efficiency, as we learned how to better approach the engineering problems encountered. If this where the case, the massive weight per HP engines, developed at the turn of the last century, should be boiled down to a simple molten lump of magical alloy, with two moving parts, lurking under the hoods of our cars by now, considering all the development. In reality we add to the complexity, making more of what we started with in terms of ability, efficiency, etc. 500 pounds per HP was once the norm, while now we have miniature V8's, you can hold in the palm of you hand that can generate several HP. Previously, you brought an "oiler" along for the ride, because you'd need him on an afternoon's outing. Now you can drive 100,000 miles without a drop and the engine isn't very damaged, as a result of this neglect. All this convolution, as improvements come to be. The same thing has happened to my other half over the years too . . . damnit . . .
     
  9. Rurudyne
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    Rurudyne Senior Member

    The one thing that's irreducible is human desire, even without the boys down in the marketing throwing their hats into the ring (I love Scott Adams' take on marketing).

    Machines will always have enough parts to vex, though we may someday hope all the bolts will be accessible without some expensive special tool ordinary people like you or I can't buy anyway.

    I wasn't poking fun at your invention, btw. It's seems a cool idea. It's good you realize it could consume your resources to develop it. It's sad it might.

    And I say that as someone who would want a "fairly trim/light displacement craft" if I had the means and who would, quite frankly, be interested.

    Random aside: in Harvey Birdman: Attorney at Law it was revealed the the Jetsons was set in the far off year of 2002 ... which, however silly the source, would be believable of the 1960s mindset about the future ... which we didn't get.
     
  10. PAR
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    PAR Yacht Designer/Builder

    I'm not so sure about that. If you look at the time capsules buried for the millennium change, we nailed down quite a bit of the "innovations" they suspected we might, plus quite a bit more. We do have flying cars, though not really in the numbers they thought, but not because of the technology limitations, but buracratic. Communications are way past what they thought might occur, the same would be true of technology in general. Robotics are way ahead of Rosie in many ways, though much too costly for mass consumption. Then there are things they just didn't think of, such as digital imaging, GPS, the internet, mapping the human genome, MRI's, micro processors, laser/robotic surgery, E-commerce, social networking, genetically modified plants and animals, bio fuels, just to touch on a few . . .
     
  11. Rurudyne
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    Rurudyne Senior Member

    Don't want a flying car, be happy with a live aboard that didn't need gas to cruise at a decent speed. ;)
     
  12. PAR
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    PAR Yacht Designer/Builder

    I have a few of these and they use Mother Nature's breath to propel them.
     
  13. Rurudyne
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    Rurudyne Senior Member

  14. BMcF
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    BMcF Senior Member

    Navatek (and another company outside the US whose name I don't recall) have built pretty much exactly that active stern foil system you envision/describe. Navatek had one on a demonstration craft that they brought to the MACC conference in Little Creek, VA a number of years ago.
     

  15. daiquiri
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    daiquiri Engineering and Design

    I hope they don't intend to patent that thing, because technically it is not a new solution at all.

    Or, to express it a bit better - it might be a new concept in the marine world (or it might not, as Tom speer, PAR and BMcF have implied), but definitely not in the world of aeronautics or car racing. I remember a lecture on aerodynamics of F1 cars, which was held at our university by Ferrari aerodynamicists. It was back in 90's. One of themes was how to decrease the aerodynamic drag of the car, and one of the strategies explored was the use of small horizontal wings conveniently placed at some points along the car body. These wings would exploit the fact that the local airflow around the car body is generally not aligned to the free stream airflow, and hence a lifting surface can be placed in such oblique airflow in order to generate a forward component of the aerodynamic force - a thrust. Or, looking at it globally, the total drag of the car would be decreased by the amount of local thrust force produced by the wings. And that is precisely what we see in that proposal by Mr. Van Oossanen's team. Of course, the local thrust might as well become an additional drag, if the wings are not properly designed or if the flow conditions change.

    So, I don't see how it could be patented, unless one considers the naval industry as separated from the rest of the technical universe.
     
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