It is known that the water "splashes-up" or rises above the undisturbed surface immediately in front of a planing surface. This rise is greatest in front of a flat planing plate and a number of attempts have been made to reduce the experimental measurements of this phenomenon to some kind of order. Since it was first independently proposed by both Schnitzer and Smiley in 1952, all attempts to correlate the flat plate splash-up have started with the assumption that splash is only a function of the immersed length of the plate and is independent of trim angle at least below about 2o% In part, this was because the three early studies which compared this hypothesis with experimental data omitted those portions of the data which did not support the hypothesis.The present paper concludes that this forty year old hypothesis is fallacious and that the water rise in front of any prismatic planing surface is best approximated by k sin2z where d is the vertical water rise at the water/keel intersection; b is the beam; l is the submerged length of the keel; z is the trim angle; k is a constant determined from experiment, approximated by; k=ze -263, where fi is the deadrise angle in radians.It might be thought that this is a slight contribution, of little practical import, but for one thing. Starting in the 195o's most towing tank experimenters in the United States abandoned the difficult measurement of model draft and obtained only the "actually wetted length" from underwater photographs. But theoretical planing force calculations require a knowledge of the relationship between a hull and the undisturbed water plane. Thus if modern experimental data is to be compared with theory, it is necessary to estimate what the undefined splash-up or water rise was during each experiment, in order to estimate the model's true position in space.The paper concludes by criticizing the format of some modern reports of experiments with model planing hulls and suggests that, in addition to the usual graphical presentations, measured data should always be reported numerically. Also, that when relevant data is omitted from a plot, the facts of such omission should be clearly stated.
Water rise and splash-upThe fastest boats are planing craft. As the name implies, the dynamic forces developed on the relatively straight (fore and aft) bottom of such a craft lift it up in the water, so that its actual wetted surface area on calm water is only a small fraction of its total plan area. Ideally, the wetted surface area varies inversely as the square of the boat's speed, so that the high speed resistance is roughly independent of speed. The total hydrodynamic resistance of such a craft is the sum of the skin friction on its bottom and a pressure drag term. For the simplest case of a prismatic planing surface, the pressure drag is R sinz, so that the energy input associated with this drag component is uoR sinz. Half this energy is dissipated in the downwards deflection of the water which produces the dynamic force R and the other half appears ...