Slamming, the impact between a marine craft's hull and the water surface is a critical load case for structural design of marine vessels. The importance of hull slamming has led to a significant body of work to understand, predict and model these impacts. There is however, a lack of experimental data for validation, particularly for deformable panels and sandwich structures. This paper describes a high-velocity panel slamming test system that enables the generation of comprehensive and reliable experimental data on slamming impacts for both rigid and flexible panel structures. The pressure magnitudes, time-histories and spatial distributions resulting from testing of a nominally rigid panel have been compared with previous analytical, semi-empirical and experimental studies. Slamming impacts of a deformable sandwich panel are shown to cause different pressures to those from a rigid panel impact, resulting in increased transverse shear loading at the panel edge.
