trimaran hull form

• PERFORMANCE TOPICS

Optimising Hull Lines for Performance

This article was inspired by a question about the rocker line in the new 8.5m cat Design 256 and I want to stick to the point, so we won’t turn it into a book, but I’ll discuss two issues, hull fineness ratio and some aspects of the rocker profile.

When you manipulate the hull form you’re adjusting the lines in three planes, waterplanes (plan view), buttocks (side view including the keel rocker) and the section shapes. So you need to be aware of how the shapes are changing in the other two planes as you manipulate any one of these three, or all three globally as is now possible with computer modelling.

There are two fundamental constants that you start with and don’t change throughout the process. The big one is the displacement or the amount of buoyancy you need.

If you make the hull finer by narrowing the waterlines you have to increase the draft or make the ends fuller to get back to the required displacement number.

If you flatten the rocker line you have to increase the hull width, fill out the ends, or square up the section shapes rather than having a V or rounded V. 

The other constant is the longitudinal centre of buoyancy. You really can’t do any meaningful shaping of the hull form until you have settled on the these two constants.

A third number that we can plug in as a constant if we want to is the prismatic coefficient which describes bow much volume there is end the ends relative to the cross section shape in the middle of the boat, but in sailing boats this is of less importance compared to other factors. 

The hull lines for Design 256, 8.5m Cat. It's that hump in the rocker line - right under the back of the cabin that brought up the question and is one of the key points discussed here.

Hull fineness.

Fine hulls are fast, but only in the higher speed range. There’s a misconception I come across quite a bit that you can add weight and windage and you’ll still be fast as long as your hulls are fine.

Well you won’t be. Your boat will simply sink to find the new state of equilibrium. If your transoms are submerged you’ll have more drag. If your bridge deck is too close to the water you’ll have slamming. Much better to be conservative with your displacement figure in the design stage than overly optimistic.

And fine hulls have more wetted area so you have more drag in light air where friction resistance is the primary drag factor. 

I’ve seen promotional material for catamarans stating that the boat has less wetted area because it has fine hulls. For a given displacement the minimum wetted area is described by a sphere (or a semi sphere in the case of a floating object). The more you stretch it out in length, keeping the displacement constant, the more wetted area you have.

The more you make the section shape into a deep V or a broad U with tight corners, as opposed to a semicircle, the more wetted area you have. Add into the equation finer hulls are slower to tack.

So fine hulls are only an advantage if your boat is light and has enough sail area to ensure you’re travelling at speeds where form resistance is greater than skin resistance.

In my view the advantage of fine hulls is often overrated as it applies to cruising cats.

At the other end of the scale the resistance curve is fairly flat up to about 1:9 which is still quite fast in most conditions. From there the resistance rises steeply as the hull gets fatter and at 1:8 and fatter you’re suffering from some serious form drag.

This is the rocker line isolated from the lines plan above (in blue) and and the red line shows a more moderate rocker line that achieves the same buoyancy and maintains the centre of buoyancy in the same position.  The bow is to the right.

In the image lower right I've squashed it up and increased the height to make the difference in the lines more obvious.

The difference in the two lines is quite subtle, but races are often won or lost by seconds.

Rocker Profile

So if we’re looking for low wetted area we would want a rocker profile that was even and rounded, relatively deep in the middle and rising smoothly to the surface at each end. But this would give us a low prismatic which is not ideal in the higher speed range, and it’s not ideal for pitch damping which in my view is the critical design factor that is often underrated. 

Pitching is slow. It destroys the airflow in your sails and the flow around the hulls, and your performance is suffering from slamming loads.

The single most effective way to counter pitching is with asymmetry in the water planes. You can achieve that in the with a fine bow and broad transom. Or you can achieve it with V sections forward and a flattened U shape aft. Or you can achieve it in the profile view with a very straight run forward and a bump in the aft sections. A flatter rocker line is better for resisting pitching than an evenly curved one with deeper draft in the middle.

The final result is a combination of all three of these factors.

On a cat like Design 256 the weight is concentrated well aft so we need to get buoyancy well aft.

The kink you see in the rocker profile helps to do this. It also helps to keep the rocker straight for most of its length and smooth the water flow exiting the hull aft at higher speeds, possibly promoting some planing effect.

If we had a more even rocker line we would slightly reduce the wetted area, but we would increase the pitching and the water would exit the hull aft at a steeper angle, increasing form drag in the higher speed range.

How much of a bump can you put in there without creating a flow separation, and how damaging would that flow separation be? I really don’t know. The way all of these factors interplay in the various conditions we sail in is very complex.

Ultimately a lot of this work is gut feel nurtured by experience, observing things in nature and most importantly experimenting and trying new ideas.

Is the new Groupama AC45 a breakthrough that will influence the form of racing catamarans into the future? I don’t think anyone has a computer that can answer that. We have to wait and see.

Symmetric and non symmetric water-planes. The blue line with grey fill is the DWL from the design above. As is typical with modern cat hulls the bow is long and fine, the stern is full and rounded. This is the asymmetry that has a damping effect on pitching. The red line on the other hand is more like you would see on a double ended monohull and quite a few multihulls have also used this shape in the past. It's quite symmetric about the pitch axis and does not have good pitch resistance.

The hull lines of the new 8.5m Sports Cat Design 256

Mad Max , Previously Carbon Copy . She was designed in 1997 but she's the current (2016) title holder of the Australian Multihull Chamionships (2 successive years) and the fastest inshore racing boat in Australian waters.

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Trimaran Hull form Optimization Using Shipflow®

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Comparing the Cross 18 with the newer W17

QUES:   As your W17 appears to be ‘not unlike the older Cross 18’ trimaran design, would you care to comment on any differences, and why you felt it necessary to design the W17, with the Cross 18 design still being available?   .......   Harvey, CA 2019

ANSWER:   Be pleased to - being a timely excuse to share some subtleties of design.   But first, let me say that back in the 1980’s when I first got hooked on Trimarans, I was quite a fan of Norman Cross’s designs.   I thought they were rightly ‘conservative in design’ but also that they looked better than most of the competition of that era. Around that time, I also made a point of meeting Mr Cross at one of the early World Multihull Symposiums organized by the late Editor/Founder of Multihulls Magazine Charles Chiodi, along with designers Brown, Crowther & Wharram.  It was to be all part of my early Multihull learning experience and I am still very thankful for all that we can learn from these early pioneers.

But there’s been ‘a lot of water under the bridge’ since then.   His Cross 18 was probably his smallest boat and designed back in the late 1960’s .. now some 50 years back!     Despite that, I would not dismiss a design based on age alone - (still too many Herreshoff beauties around ;) – but for me, I later become aware of a sufficient number of potential design-upgrades, that I felt a new boat could take things to another level.

I will go through these briefly and explain what they offer … as always, from my personal study, tests, knowledge & experience, but acknowledging that others may come to somewhat different conclusions.

Most hull designs to be built of plywood, from the 50’s right up to the end of the century, attempted to replicate the round bilge hulls of carvel, moulded ply or fiberglass construction, by using multiple chines.   The Brown, Crowther and Cross boats were early examples of that while the Scarab’s are more recent ones.   (We also have Constant Camber (CC) that has no chines, though this method is more limited in what shape can be produced.  see Construction Methods ).   A system using multiple chines works very well for a hull with a fair amount of rocker or what I call ‘a banana hull’, as the lay of each plywood strake tends to be fairer if the ends rise up.  This also gives a fairly Vee'd section up forward that blends most naturally into a rounded, cutaway forefoot.   The majority of boats designed before 2000 show these features, so many have become conditioned into thinking this is generally the best shape for a boat.   But I will ‘stick my neck out’ and say, my studies have shown this not to be entirely true.

I worked for a while on submarines and was reminded that a volume of displacement well underwater creates far less residuary (wave) resistance than one that disturbs the surface water, so when I am looking for a specific volume of displacement to support a given weight, I am looking to see how I can place this low under the surface, with the least disturbance of the water surface.    What NA’s call SWATH vessels are an ultimate example of this with a submarine form under the water to support the weight but with a very fine part passing up through the water surface, offering minimal wave making.   While this is not practical for a heeling sailboat, it shows a direction we may want to consider. 

Also, another thing to consider is that the vee’d hulls of the multi-chine (or CC) construction, also give a rapid increase in buoyancy at and above the waterline.   ‘ This is great’ the old guard may say, but it’s been my observation that this rapid increase in buoyancy has a couple of concerning negative effects.

It not only disturbs the surface water, throwing it outward as white spume that flies in the air and back into the boat making it pretty wet, but it also overacts on the bow, throwing it way up in the air, starting a pendulum pitching that can rapidly increase, especially if the wave spacing & speed are ‘just right’ (or perhaps I should say, 'just wrong' ;).   This is further enhanced when the hull profile is of a banana shape, making a see-saw out of the boat.    It’s now possible to look at the banana shape of an older trimaran AMA and say with some certainty, ‘she will pitch a lot’ .   This is aggravated when the center of flotation of the ama is longitudinally close to that of the main hull, making a too-perfect pivot point right across the boat.

So, when designing the W17, I have done all I can to get away from both a flared vee’d in section and a banana hull in profile, as well as designing the two hulls with a center of flotation as far apart as practical to dampen out any synchronous pitching.  This has required nearly vertical hull sides, plus hulls with minimal rocker, and with any chine, as straight (‘non-banana’) as physically possible.   Center of flotation was pushed forward on the amas but kept back on the main hull.

But this is not the end of the hull form difference.   We must also consider the cross section.    As most boats, including the multi-chine of the Cross, have a rounded cross section, we must acknowledge that this will permit some transverse flow under the hull.  This will occur when lateral wind force presses on the boat, causing what we define as ‘leeway’.    On a keel boat, the deep continuous side skin greatly limits that side flow, but on a hull without a keel, it takes a very efficient foil to limit that side slip … typically a deep aero-foil dagger (or center) board.    But just pull up that board when sailing to windward and see what happens!  The boat crabs sideways, slows down and steering control is much reduced.  So despite adding its own wetted surface, it has to stay down just to get to windward..

But what if we change the sections of the main hull so that it’s NOT round and make it into a box section with very small-radius corners that will discourage any transverse flow?  Now most of the flow will be along its length and the bonus is that we’ve now also moved some displacement lower down, well under the water surface, enabling the section to have a narrower waterline for the same displacement.

The above thinking is not totally new, even if this application may be.  Sharpie designs by the likes of Ralph Monroe, Howard Chapelle, Van de Stadt*, Phil Bolger and others, share many of these attributes but there’s one very important difference.   Monohull sharpie’s are long and narrow and therefore limited in basic transverse stability, while with a trimaran, stability comes from the outer amas.   * [I grew up sailing the Solent when Van de Stadt's Zeevalk and later Black Soo , were flying around the British south coast ... advertisements for Kees Bruynzeel’s new marine plywood at the time, and I loved these slim, near vertical-sided sharpies ... but as monos, they needed very deep fin keels with ~50% ballast down there to carry their sail ... a major compromise that even slimmer tri main hulls do not have to deal with.] 

Another advantage of the near vertical-sided boxy main hull, is the way these hulls do not significantly change the shape of the water while passing through waves.  This seems to be overlooked by many designers today, as vee'd hulls are still very prevalent.  Rather than explain this again here, I'd like to reference this article that I prepared for an Australian club magazine, as it includes some diagrams that clearly show the potential negative effect of highly vee'd hulls in waves.

For the amas (outriggers), there are also several significant differences between those of the Cross 18 and the W17.   First, the W17 pushes its volume and center of flotation farther forward to reduce the pitching as noted above and also reduces nose diving too.  (In his WB review of the W17, Geoff Kerr noted " ... I saw no sign of that dreaded beach-cat tendency to bury the lee bow." .) 

The W17 also totally avoids any banana profile by having a deeper bow and straighter lines.   Most trimarans use symmetrical hulls port & starboard as does the Cross, but contrary to catamarans where symmetry makes good sense, trimaran amas are not both in the water at the same time and the one that is significantly immersed is typically always to leeward, so it presents an interesting opportunity to be asymmetrical, IF indeed there is seen to be any advantage.    

(for more on this, see:    https://smalltridesign.com/pdfs/W17ProBoatOctNov2017.pdf )

                                                                                                   .

Other design differences are noted here:

Cross beams (akas) on the Cross 18 are straight and slightly below deck level, whereas on the W17, they are raised higher above waves to rarely contact them, making the boat either drier or adding capability in the rough stuff.

Although both boats have split-aka pivot-hinges, the W17 design is flat and wider, so can be walked and sat on.    Today, both hinges & latches are home molded in fiberglass for the W17, making them lighter, stronger and corrosion free.  See Folding Systems Part 3 for more on this. The W17 beams are far more robust than those on the Cross, adding to its rough water capability as well as to its appearance.   As many have commented, the uniquely faired forward beam of the W17 gives it the look of a miniature ocean racer as well as less wind and water resistance. 

The conservative Norman Cross was known to not like rotating masts, but he was missing out, and today all top performing multihulls have them.   Rotating wing-masts are standard on the W17 and their Build-it-Yourself designs are offered to suit each rig, in wood or carbon fiber. These masts add significantly to upwind performance.

One weakness on many small boats is the commonly suspended rudder attachment.  On boats that cruise long distances, rudder damage is by far the most common.  (In the late 60's, a teenaged Peter Clutterbuck cruised his British 16ft open Wayfarer dinghy to wildly-unrealistic places such as Denmark, Sweden, France and even across the Bay of Biscay!  While he survived 2 capsizes he also reportedly suffered 9  rudder failures !).   On the W17 a totally different mount is employed, that spreads the load from the deck to the hull bottom, creating a very strong mount.  In addition, the W17 sports a balanced spade rudder totally under the hull, which still pops up with an auto-release in case of touching the bottom.  Its improved location permits it to have less depth than a transom-hung rudder and still be highly effective. With a raised daggerboard and the low hull-leeway, this permits the W17 to be sailed to windward in as little as 2ft of water if so needed.

The W17 mainsheet arrangement is upgraded with a full width radiused traveler, permitting the mainsail to be sheeted down flat without use of a kicking strap (boom vang), adding to boat control and safety in windy conditions.  

The more efficient flat-top full-battened mainsail is also stowed on a boom that is rotated via a removable handle and this not only adds life to the sail, but also keeps the cockpit tidy ... (see photo below).

The cockpit seat backs contain 6 small deck lockers.

To reduce fatigue and give variety, the W17 can be sailed from at least 6 different areas on the boat as the helm is very light.  Two lightweight, 6ft extensions that reach well forward and to either ama, enable this.

It’s also acknowledged that, while the hulls of the W17 are basically easier to build (using the ABC System) and retain a cleaner frame-free interior, the shaped beams of the W17 take a little more time, so the total construction period might be a little more.   W17 builders think it’s well worth it though, noting the advantages and improved esthetics that this newer design offers.

Yet having clarified all that, a few builders will still appreciate to build and own the old classic C-18 design so we hope its plans will still be available for years to come.   As someone who always tries to works with ‘facts’, it’s fair to add that the extra length of the Cross 18 should theoretically help speed and seaworthiness; the quasi-rounded bottom of the hulls should give a gentle ride and lower skin drag at slow speeds; and the more vee’d hull will sink slightly less with excess load.  But for other aspects, it will miss the many W17’s perks.

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Trimaran hull design for fast ferry applications

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The hydrodynamic characteristics of twelve hull forms of existing high-speed vehicular and passenger-only catamaran ferries with a length greater than 40 metres are presented and discussed, together with 2 other modeltested hull forms, covering both resistance and ship motions. Comment is made on the actual performance on trials when compared against the tank test results, together with the results from various numerical prediction methods. The hull forms include round-bilge, soft-chine and hard-chine shapes, representing semi-displacement hulls and Semi-SWATH hulls, and includes the effects of motion control devices. The effect of bulbous bows and transom sterns is discussed. The hull forms cover a range of speeds up to a Froude number of 1.2. Although not a systematic series, the trends resulting from variations in hull shape and characteristics are evident.

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A case study: theoretical and experimental analysis of motion characteristics of a trimaran hull form, ships and offshore structures - united kingdom, doi 10.1080/17445300701430242.

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BMT launches the next generation hull-form – the ‘Pentamaran’

Designed to meet the specific challenges of long range autonomous operations

• bmt launches the next generation hull-form – the ‘Pentamaran’

21 April 2020

Leading the way in multi-hull applications, BMT has released details of its next generation ‘Pentamaran’ platform for autonomous applications. Offering a myriad of applications for defence and commercial innovators, these innovative vessels may be custom configured for military, patrol, intelligence surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR), anti-submarine warfare (ASW) and hydrographic survey work.

The design is the latest from the BMT’s team of expert naval architects and engineers who have been at the forefront of innovative hull design for 34 years. The Pentamaran has been designed to reduce drag as much as possible and tests have proven it offers significant improvements compared to conventional hull forms such as mono-hulls, catamarans and trimaran.

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Martin Bissuel, Business Sector Lead for Specialised Ship Design at BMT comments:

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Research progress on intelligent optimization techniques for energy-efficient design of ship hull forms

• Published: 28 August 2024

Cite this article

• Shuwei Zhu 1 ,
• Ning Sun 1 ,
• Siying Lv 1 ,
• Kaifeng Chen 1 ,
• Wei Fang 1 &
• Leilei Cao 2  

The design optimization of ship hull form based on hydrodynamics theory and simulation-based design (SBD) technologies generally considers ship performance and energy efficiency performance as the design objective, which plays an important role in smart design and manufacturing of green ship. An optimal design of sustainable energy system requires multidisciplinary tools to build ships with the least resistance and energy consumption. Through a systematic approach, this paper presents the research progress of energy-efficient design of ship hull forms based on intelligent optimization techniques. We discuss different methods involved in the optimization procedure, especially the latest developments of intelligent optimization algorithms and surrogate models. Moreover, current development trends and technical challenges of multidisciplinary design optimization and surrogate-assisted evolutionary algorithms for ship design are further analyzed. We explore the gaps and potential future directions, so as to pave the way toward the design of the next generation of more energy-efficient ship hull form.

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This work was supported by the Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. 62206113 and 62073155), the Natural Science Foundation of Jiangsu Province (Grant Nos. BK20221067 and BK20230923), and in part by the High-End Foreign Expert Recruitment Plan (Grant No. G2023144007L).

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Shuwei Zhu, Ning Sun, Siying Lv, Kaifeng Chen & Wei Fang

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Shuwei Zhu wrote the main manuscript text, Ning Sun and Siying Lv prepared figures 1–6, Kaifeng Chen and Leilei Cao checked the English editing, and Shuwei Zhu and Wei Fang provided funding. All authors reviewed the manuscript.

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Zhu, S., Sun, N., Lv, S. et al. Research progress on intelligent optimization techniques for energy-efficient design of ship hull forms. J Membr Comput (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s41965-024-00169-6

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Received : 09 May 2024

Accepted : 31 July 2024

Published : 28 August 2024

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/s41965-024-00169-6

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• Ship hull form design
• Simulation-based design
• Intelligent optimization
• Energy efficiency
• Surrogate model
• Evolutionary algorithm

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