Predicting the Hydrodynamic Performmance of Very High Speed Craft: A Note on some of the problems

Predicting the hydrodynamic performance of very high speed craft is a particularly challenging task. As high speed craft tend to be smaller than conventional craft, with consequently lower design budgets, the budget available to predict their performance is often smaller than that available to the designers of larger conventional craft. The paper discusses the issues associated with predicting the hydrodynamic performance of high speed craft. It is shown that numerical techniques are generally not considered sufficiently accurate for many aspects of high speed craft performance, and that many of the assumptions made when conducting model experiments on conventional vessels, and extrapolating the results to full scale, are not valid for high speed craft. © 2007: Royal Institution of Naval Architects.