Ship model basin

An engineering firm acts as a contractor to the relevant shipyards, and provides hydrodynamic model tests and numerical calculations to support the design and development of ships and offshore structures.

The eminent English engineer William Froude published a series of influential papers on ship designs for maximising stability in the 1860s.

He established a formula (now known as the Froude number) by which the results of small-scale tests could be used to predict the behaviour of full-sized hulls.

His experiments were later vindicated in full-scale trials conducted by the Admiralty and as a result the first ship model basin was built, at public expense, at his home in Torquay.

[1] Inspired by Froude's successful work, shipbuilding company William Denny and Brothers completed the world's first commercial example of a ship model basin in 1883.

The facility was used to test models of a variety of vessels and explored various propulsion methods, including propellers, paddles and vane wheels.

[2] The hydrodynamic test facilities present at a model basin site include at least a towing tank and a cavitation tunnel and workshops.

This is a test facility that is wide enough to investigate arbitrary angles between waves and the ship model, and to perform maneuvers like turning circles, for which the towing tank is too narrow.

Additionally, these companies or authorities have CFD software and experience to simulate the complicated flow around ships and their rudders and propellers numerically.