Virginia tech advanced towing carriage

Abstract

Virginia Tech has recently acquired a new towing carriage and vertical planar motion mechanism. The new towing carriage replaces the original carriage that was installed in the 1960s. The original carriage had a maximum speed of roughly 3 m/s, and the new carriage has a maximum speed of 7 m/s with the current wavemaker installation. The towing tank facility is used for both teaching and research activities in ocean engineering. The vertical planar motion mechanism includes two linear actuators to change the pitching and heaving behavior of a surface or subsurface test article to model different phenomena such as slamming or porpoising of surface vessels and vertical plane maneuvers for subsurface vessels. The focus of this paper is on the determination of the specifications for the towing tank to meet both teaching and research needs and the early resistance experiments that have been conducted during initial shake-down of the new facility. The authors will discuss how preliminary resistance experiments compare to the USNA towing tank facility.