On the energy economics of air lubrication drag reduction

By Simo A. Mäkiharju, Marcelo Perlin, S. Ceccio. 2012

138 citations recorded by the source corpus.

ABSTRACT Air lubrication techniques for frictional drag reduction on ships have been proposed by numerous researchers since the 19th century. However, these techniques have not been widely adopted as questions persist about their drag reduction performance beyond the laboratory, as well as energy and economic cost-benefit. This paper draws on data from the literature to consider the suitability of air lubrication for large ocean going and U.S. Great Lakes ships, by establishing the basic energy economic calculations and presenting results for a hypothetical air lubricated ship. All the assumptions made in the course of the analysis are clearly stated so that they can be refined when considering application of air lubrication to a specific ship. The analysis suggests that, if successfully implemented, both air layer and partial cavity drag reduction could lead to net energy savings of 10 to 20%, with corresponding reductions in emissions.

Subfields: Biomedical Engineering, Environmental Engineering, Ocean Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/08fc8394d7e311ab1d43bcbf2b687859a01965a2

Citations in the corpus

• Frictional drag reduction by bubble injection (2014, unknown): “In application to vessels, there are further uncontrollable factors of the boundary layer, which make the causal relationship between the fuel consumption rate and bubbling flow rate unclear (Mizokami et al. 2010; Mäkiharju et al. 2012; Kumagai et al. 2010).”