Experimental investigation of the impact of leeway and rudder angle on the yaw moment balance for wind propelled ships

Abstract

Wind-assisted propulsion systems are growing in popularity as a technology for decarbonizing maritime transport, due to their capability to lower ships’ fuel consumption and mitigate greenhouse gas and other emissions. There is a need, however, to investigate the hydrodynamic implications of wind propulsion for these vessels, particularly the aerodynamic side force causing the hull to adopt a leeway (also known as drift) angle to its heading. The study described in this paper is focused on assessing the hydrodynamic performance of wind-assisted ships under different leeway and rudder angles conditions. A set of self-propelled captive model tests is carried out on the single-screw KCS containership vessel in the University of Southampton’s Boldrewood towing tank. The experiments are conducted in an offloaded propeller condition to represent a proportion of the required thrust coming from the wind. A range of leeway angles between ±5° are tested along with a series of rudder angles, varying from -30° to +30° with 10° increments.

A detailed discussion is provided on how varying leeway and rudder angles affect both ship resistance and lateral forces. In addition, the effect of rudder and leeway angles on the yaw moment is studied. The results indicate that as the rudder angle increases, there is a corresponding increase in ship resistance, side force, and rudder-induced yaw moment. For each leeway angle tested the required rudder angle to balance the hydrodynamic induced yaw moment is presented, demonstrating that significant rudder angles may be required for wind propelled ships.

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Identifiers

ORCID for Saeed Hosseinzadeh: orcid.org/0000-0002-5830-888X

ORCID for Dominic Hudson: orcid.org/0000-0002-2012-6255

ORCID for Stephen Turnock: orcid.org/0000-0001-6288-0400

ORCID for Martyn Prince: orcid.org/0000-0002-1870-2866

ORCID for Joseph Banks: orcid.org/0000-0002-3777-8962

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