A Basic Study on Wind Pressure Characteristics of a Trimaran PCC

In recent years, the marine transport of a car is activated, and the demand for a pure car carrier (PCC) has grown quickly in the world wide. However, there are lots of technical issues of the present PCC, like lack of stability, effect of strong winds on its resistance, difficulty of course keeping in rough seas, difficulty of berthing in strong winds and so on. To overcome these technical issues, one of the authors has proposed a trimaran PCC which has very limited number of transverse bulkheads in the center hull by using two side hulls as fenders. In this study, wind forces and moments acting on a scale model of the trimaran PCC are measured in the towing tank with wind fans of Osaka Prefecture University. Furthermore, in order to find the parameters affecting on wind pressure, height and width of tunnels which are between a center hull and two side hulls are changed. To analyze it qualitatively, the flow field around the body is calculated by CFD. The wind pressure acting on the body is compared with that on a mono-hull PCC. Using these experimental and theoretical results, the wind pressure characteristics of a trimaran PCC are obtained.