Side wall effects on ship model testing in a towing tank

Due to the existence of the side walls in a towing tank, the measured hydrodynamic forces would present some discrepancies compared to the open sea results. This phenomenon is referred to as the side wall effect. The objective of the present study is to investigate the side wall effects on ship model testing in a towing tank. The method used in the present study involves a 3D panel method based on the Rankine type Green function. Both the steady and unsteady problems were investigated numerically. The numerical results were validated against ship model test results. After the validations, a large scale computations were performed to investigate the parameters which could determine the side wall effects. Two diagrams of side wall effects (one in calm water and the other one in waves), were obtained which showed whether the side wall effect was less than the permissible error to be included in the measured values.