3.2 Wind tests
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Statutory Documents - IMO Publications and Documents - Circulars - Maritime Safety Committee - MSC.1/Circular.1227 – Explanatory Notes to the Interim Guidelines for Alternative Assessment of the Weather Criterion – (11 January 2007) - Annex - Explanatory Notes to the Interim Guidelines for Alternative Assessment of the Weather Criterion - 3The determination of the wind heeling lever lw1 - 3.2Wind tests

3.2 Wind tests

  3.2.1 The arrangement for the wind tunnel tests is shown in figure 3.1. The connection between the model and load cell had a rotating device for testing the model in heeled conditions. In heeled conditions the height of the model was adjusted by the adjusting plate to keep the displacement constant when floating freely. The change of trim due to heel was neglected.

  3.2.2 In order to keep the blockage ratio less than 5%, the floor plate was set to the same level of the floor of the tunnel. The gap between the model and the floor plate was kept within approximately 3 mm and covered by soft sheets for avoiding the effect of downflow through the gapfootnote.

Arrangement for wind tunnel tests

  3.2.3 The vertical distribution of wind speed is shown in figure 3.2. For the test arrangement (figure 3.1), the height of the ship model from the floor was approximately 19 cm in upright condition. This means that the lower half of the model is placed in the boundary layer. The distributions of wind speed in the lateral and longitudinal directions were almost uniform (deviation less than 1%) around the model.

Vertifical distribution of wind speed

  3.2.4 The wind speed was varied from 5 m/s to 15 m/s in upright condition and confirmed that the drag coefficient is almost constant in this speed range. For the full tests a wind speed of 10 m/s was used, corresponding to a Reynolds' number of 1.52× 105, as defined by the following equation:

where U is the uniform wind speed outside the boundary layer, B is the breadth of the model and ν is the kinematic viscosity coefficient of air.

  3.2.5 The horizontal force Fwind , the heeling moment M and the lift force L were measured by the load cell. The heeling moment M was converted to the one with respect to point O, defined as Mwind , by the following equation:

where l is the distance from the centre of the load cell to point O. The point O is defined as the cross point of the centreline of the ship and waterline in upright condition.


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