A Procedure For Wave Loads Assessment Of Fast Trimaran Ships

At this time a great experience about trimaran structure scantling does not still exist owing to the very poor number of units built all over the world. Existing HSC rules can be considered more than a simple help for the designer but, in this case, they does not make reference specifically to trimarans. In the context of a concept design of a trimaran fast ferry developed at the University of Genova by DINAV, a procedure for structure scantling has been developed starting from a preliminary approach based on HSC rules, up to the determination of global design loads by a long term analysis. In this paper the latter part is described together with some comparisons with previous finite element calculations