Hydrofoil education and research platform

Hydrofoil craft can provide fast and comfortable transportation of people. By exploiting existing waterways (“Blauwe Route”) at a relatively high speed hydrofoil craft fill a unique niche between standard ships (slow), landbased transport such as cars (can not use Blauwe Route”) and air-transport such as helicopters( expensive). This transportation niche is particular interesting in dense urban areas such as the Netherlands, but is also relevant in offshore crew supply and naval operations.

Apart from the advantages provided by hydrofoil craft there are also some issues that limit its current use. The challenge is to maintain comfortable and safe navigation, especially in presence of waves, in a cost effective manner. Current solutions are to complex and fragile leading to high capital and maintenance costs. To address this issue, and make hydrofoil craft economically feasible, the TU Delft ship-hydrodynamics lab has started a research line investigating alternative hydrofoil craft and lift control concepts. The latter, alternative lift control, is the topic of “Lift control for hydrofoil craft” project.

In this project we, together with Flying-Fish, will develop hardware platform for hydrofoil education and research. The platfrom is intended to be flexible and versatile allowing all kinds of foils, foil arrangements and control strategies to be test.

Vacancy
To aid the embedding of the hydrofoil test platform into education and research we will enlist the help of a post-doctoral researcher (PD) for one year. The PD will be tasked with:
• Acceptance testing of hydrofoil test platform.
• Write a manual for using the hydrofoil.
• Investigate the validity of the design assumptions.
• Supervise students working with the platform.
• Help prepare MSc course focusing on hydrofoil stability, seakeeping and manoeuvring.
• Write a reflection on the current, and potential future, hydrofoil platform(s). Reporting positive and negative aspect of the current platform and suggestions for improvements, upgrades and alternatives.
If you are interested in this post doc position, please contact dr.ir. Ido Akkerman.

Participants
dr.ir. Ido Akkerman
dr.ing.Sebastian Schreier
dr. Gunnar Jacobi, MSc