A new experimental setup to test the influence of wind propulsion on manoeuvring and seakeeping

With the rapid growth in wind propulsion installations within the market, it becomes increasingly relevant to define reliable test procedures to validate whether ships with substantial wind propulsion also show acceptable manoeuvring and seakeeping. Depending on the specific case and wind condition, wind propulsion can have significant impact on a ship’s response. Earlier research showed that a test setup with a “real wind field” on a moving carriage, was capable to model wind propulsion, but this method also had its limitations. Therefore, a new test setup was developed within the EU OPTIWISE project (https://optiwise-project.eu), implementing the lessons learned from earlier investigations using winches. The newly developed test setup expands the number of winches to five, enabling to independently apply surge, sway and yaw loads and to allow the ship model to complete a turning circle without entangling lines. Our OPTIWSE partner Chantiers de l’ Atlantique contributed a cruise vessel design with substantial wind propulsion, which was assessed on manoeuvring and seakeeping performance using this new test setup. The results indicate that the test setup works well and will be further standardised to ensure that ships remain safe in operation and compliant to current and developing regulations on wind propulsion. This paper includes a detailed description of the test setup and presents some test results achieved with the cruise vessel design.