EXPERIMENTAL STUDY AND NUMERICAL SIMULATION ON SLAMMING OF HIGH-SPEED TRIMARAN

The study on slamming of high speed trimaran is a very complicated and significant topic. Ship slamming is a nonlinear unsteady problem in which dynamic boundary and coupling among structure, air and water should be considered. It is a key issue in the ship research field. Unlike the slamming of ordinary monohull, trimaran slamming include not only main hull bottom slamming, but also slamming of trimaran cross structure, which makes trimaran slamming more complicated. In this paper, a reduced scale model of trimaran was constructed and an experiment was carried out in order to study the slamming pressure distribution on main hull and cross structure. By using nonlinear simulation software Autodyn, a finite element model was established to simulate the process that trimaran model enters into water. The accuracy and reliability of numerical simulation is validated by comparing experimental data and numerical simulation results. Furthermore, some valuable conclusions on trimaran slamming are obtained.