Feel The Flow 2: Microbubbles Mark Stothers Lord Tweedsmuir Secondary Floor Location : S 201 E

With the rapid increase of intercontinental sea trade between the Port of Vancouver, Asia, and the world, it has never been a more opportune time to engineer increasingly efficient commercial ship hull designs and technologies. Benefits of more efficient ship hull designs include faster travel, and less fuel utilised in the transportation of commodities. Additional environmental benefits include decreased emissions in commercial shipping.

In the past Engineers have struggled to decrease ship resistance by 1% or less, by means of new, highly advanced ship hull designs. These designs may have some small impact on the commercial shipping industry, but "Feel The Flow 2: Microbubbles" intends to utilize exciting new microbubble air cavity technology to decrease water/hull contact by up to 80%, allowing for commercial shipping vessels to travel at highway speeds of up to 110 km an hour.

Microbubble technology utilizes very small air bubbles (created in "Feel The Flow 2" by air blown through porous stainless steel) which stream along the hull of ships in air cavities, decreasing boundary layer drag on the hull by inducing water to intermingle with the air surrounding the ship hull, rather than the ship hull itself.

The purpose of "Feel The Flow 2: Microbubbles" is to identify the effect of microbubble technology on the drag of a ship's hull through a viscous fluid, and to examine how this effect can be optimized to produce the most advantageous results (in terms of drag reduction).

A Question being addressed:
How can air cavities be used to decrease surface drag on ship hulls?

B Engineering Goals:
1.) Demonstrate that air cavities reduce surface drag on a scale model commercial ship hull by a statistically significant amount in contrast to the amount of drag incurred without air cavities activated on the scale model.
2.) Identify how microbubble volume vs. the velocity of a ship hull travelling on the surface of water affect the surface drag on a scale model commercial ship hull.
3.) Address the utility of modifying current commercial ship hulls to include air cavities.

C Procedure:
1.) Construction of a drag dynamometer, an apparatus
consisting of:
i.) 2.5 ? 0.5 ? 0.4 metre plastic lined wooden container capable of holding large amounts of water for extended periods of time.
ii.) Overhead drag apparatus, utilising pulleys and mass(es) .
to drag model boats through a viscous fluid (water) at consistent velocities.
iii.) Photo gate start/stop timers accurate to +/- 1%.
2.) Construction of Model Commercial Ship Hulls capable of varied microbubble output, specifically volume.
3.) Experimental procedures:
i.) Repetition of all experiments twenty times with no change in operating conditions.
ii.) Data recorded as a value timed between the arrival of the front of the boat at two positions
4.) Treatment of data:
i.) Determine mean velocity, and the corresponding standard deviation, during each experiment with no change in operating conditions.
ii.) Analysis of the statistical significance of experimental data values.

Results:
Not available yet.