The world is witnessing more and more high-performance vessels as the world navies and maritime industry demand advanced hull forms for transportation. The trimaran ship is a promising hull form due to its higher speed capability, improved stability and greater upper deck area. Recently, international research and development work has begun to focus on trimaran ship design. However, very little systematic experimental data are available to aid the designer of a trimaran. This paper presents a calm water resistance experimental study on a practical trimaran hull form. The objectives of this research are to better understand the trimaran resistance characteristics, and to create a dataset convenient for designers to optimize the side hull location for minimum resistance of similar trimaran designs. The experimental studies included testing models at two different scales to study possible effects of scale, especially on form resistance, as well as a comparison between two model test facilities in which the small scale model was tested. Trim effect on resistance was also investigated in detail.
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