Practical Ship Hydrodynamics

Preface
The first five chapters give an introduction to ship hydrodynamics, which is
in my opinion suitable for teaching at a senior undergraduate level or even at
a postgraduate level. It is thus also suitable for engineers working in industry.
The book assumes that the reader has a solid knowledge of general fluid
dynamics. In teaching, general fluid dynamics and specific ship hydrodynamics
are often mixed but I believe that universities should first teach a course
in general fluid dynamics which should be mandatory to most engineering
students. There are many good textbooks on the market for this purpose. Naval
architects should then concentrate on the particular aspects of their field and
cover material more suited to their needs. This book is organized to support
such a strategy in teaching.
The first chapter is an introduction to computational fluid dynamics, and
Chapters 2 to 5 cover the four main areas of propeller flows, resistance and
propulsion, ship seakeeping and manoeuvring. It is recommended that this
sequence be followed in teaching. The first five chapters try to find a suitable
balance for practical engineers between facts and minimizing formula work.
However, there are still formulae. These are intended to help those tasked
with computations or programming. Readers with a practical interest may
simply skip these passages. The final two chapters involve more extensive
formula work and are more specialized. They may be reserved for graduate and
post-graduate teaching and will help understanding and developing boundary
element codes. Field methods are not covered in depth here, as my colleague
Milovan Peric has already co-authored an excellent book on this particular
topic. I tried in vain to find a similar suitable textbook for boundary element
methods which would be both easy to understand and address the typical
problems encountered in ship flows. As I could not find such a book, I wrote
two chapters intended to support me in my teaching and to be of use for many
colleagues.
The book is supplemented by some public domain software written
in Fortran which is available for downloading in source code on
www.bh.com/companions/0750648511. The software consists of small
programs or subroutines which may help in developing own codes. Some of the
programs have been written by myself, some by Professor Söding, and some
by colleagues. Feel free to download the software, but there is no additional
documentation available except for the in-program comments. I will not answer
questions about the software, but you can comment on which programs you
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