Empirical Methods for Predicting Lift and Heel Moment for a Heeled Planing Hull

Even in calm water, high-speed vessels can display unstable behaviors such as chine walking, sudden large heel, and porpoising. Large heel angle can result in the loss of transverse stability at high forward speed. When a planing craft begins to plane, the hydrodynamic lift forces raise the hull out of the water, reducing the underwater geometry. An experimental program at the U.S. Naval Academy has been designed to investigate the transverse stability of planing hulls. An experimental mechanism to force a planing hull model in heave and roll motion was designed and built. The first model tested was a wooden prismatic planing hull model with a constant deadrise of 20 degrees, a beam of 1.48 ft (0.45 m), and a total length of 5 ft (1.52 m). The model was held at various heel and running draft positions while fixed in pitch, yaw, and sway. The tests were done at two model speeds, for one model displacement, five fixed heel angles, and five fixed running heave positions. The lift and sway forces, along with the heel moment, were measured and underwater photography was taken of the wetted surface. This article presents a set of equations based on empirical relationships for calculating the lift and heel moment for a prismatic planing hull at nonzero heel angles.