Friday, April 26, 2024
“It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data.” The above quote came from Sir Arthur Canon Doyle through his famous detective Sherlock Holmes in A Scandal in Bohemia and is as applicable to modern marine hybrid propulsion design as it is to solving mysteries in classic novels.
While there have been a few attempts over the years to design more efficient towboats, as a whole the inland industry has lagged behind the rest of the marine world in regards to the application of modern engineering methods to produce more efficient hull shapes. Conventional wisdom has always held that the shape of the towboat hull had very little impact on the overall efficiency of a line haul or unit tow when it comes to fuel efficiency or vessel speeds. However, TSGI has been applying state of the art Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) to analyze this very topic, with significant results to the contrary.
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