When it comes to ship performance it is important to define the term "good weather". The vessel performance, mostly fuel consumption versus speed of the vessel, depends on the weather conditions. In presence of wind, waves and currents the vessel might not be able to achieve her service speed, or needs to spend more fuel to achieve it. In good weather however, the vessel is supposed to performed as desined, or better yet, as warranted. Good weather definition is very important for assessign ship perfrmance.

In most cases, swell is neglected when it comes to ship performance, and is not a paramter that dictates whether the weather is considered good or adverse. However, swell can have a notable effect on ship performance, and this is exactly what the goal of the paper presented in this post.

We used the Cloud Towing Tank's CFD service to quantify speed loss for two different vessels in swell conditions recorded during ship voyage, in othervise good weather. The results were presetned at this year's HullPIC conference in Italy. Significant speed loss of up to 1.85 knots was predicted with the analysis. Download the full paper on the link below to read the details.