Regulatory demands on ship designs, such as emission and manoeuvrability requirements, are becoming increasingly stringent, raising the need for advanced methods to predict and assess dynamic propulsion plant behaviour of a new design. At present, model scale experiments and numerical simulations are not able to predict this behaviour in full detail; for example, model basin tests currently do not take into account the dynamics of the actual propulsion plant, while the numerical methods such as CFD are constrained by the available computational power. Our research aims to fill the resulting knowledge gap by proposing a new type of model basin experiment, essentially by introducing dynamic propulsion plant behaviour to existing scale model tests. This is not as easy as it may sound, as forces at model scale may not scale correctly due to scale effects. Finding an answer to this question allows to reproduce dynamic behaviour of the real ship in the model basin. If this can be done, better understanding of the dynamic behaviour of the ship would lead to improved propulsion systems and controls, or in general, better ships.
Lode Huijgens