Practical evaluation of sinkage and trim effects on the drag of a common generic freely floating monohull ship

A practical method to account for the influence of sinkage and trim on the drag of a freely floating (free to sink and trim) common monohull ship at a Froude number F ≤ 0.45 is considered. The sinkage and the trim are estimated via two alternative simple methods, considered previously. The drag is also estimated in a simple way, based on the classical Froude decomposition into viscous and wave components. Specifically, well-known semiempirical expressions for the friction drag, the viscous pressure drag and the drag due to hull roughness are used, and the wave drag is evaluated via a practical linear potential flow method. This simple approach can be used for ship models as well as full-scale ships with smooth or rough hull surfaces, and is well suited for early ship design and optimization. The method considered here to determine the sinkage and the trim, and their influence on the drag, yields theoretical predictions of the drag of the Wigley, S60 and DTMB5415 hulls that are much closer to experimental measurements than the corresponding predictions for the hull surfaces of the ships in equilibrium position at rest. These numerical results suggest that sinkage and trim effects, significant at Froude numbers 0.25 < F, on the drag of a typical freely floating monohull ship can be realistically accounted for in a practical manner that only requires simple potential flow computations without iterative computations for a sequence of hull positions.