Improvement on Resistance Performance of Self-Propelled Barge in Indonesia

Abstract

Self-propelled barge has been favorite fleet in Indonesia. It is because of their huge capacity and low in draught that fulfilled requirement for the shallow Indonesian waters. The Indonesian self-propelled barge fleets have various type of hull shape, from simple flat shapes to complicated streamlined shapes. This various hull shapes affect to their hydrodynamic performance and construction easiness. The streamlined hull shape may have better resistance performance, but more difficult to be constructed because they have a lot of 3-dimensional curvatures. On the other side, sharp hull shape which is dominated with flat shell plate will give easiness in construction, although resistance performance will be worse. In this study the authors would like to investigate the effect of hull’s bow shape on resistance performance of self-propelled barge, and also try combining the merits of each hull shape to get a new design which has better resistance performance. The resistance test of modified hull models are evaluated by CFD calculation. Furthermore, the Gaussian curvature that represents flatness level of the hull surface is used to evaluate the simplicity of hull form.