Abstract
Ultrasonic velocity profiler (UVP) is applied to measurement of water flow under the bottom surface of a ship. The aim of this study is to establish the practical utilization of UVP system for large ships whose power loss is generally dominated by frictional drag. As the first phase, the measurement performance is evaluated for capturing the turbulent boundary layer of a small model ship using a new ultrasonic transducer. The experiments are performed for a towing ship in a shallow pond and also for a freely supported ship in an open channel. A wedge type of ultrasonic transducer is designed so that the flow is undisturbed with it. The velocity profile including the boundary layer is successfully obtained after suitable post-processing is implemented to remove erroneous data caused by multiple reflections. Data analysis is also made to estimate the skin friction from the profiles measured.
