During the last decade catamaran ships have been very rapidly evolved into a dominant mode of sea transportation. Their particular area of proliferation is the short sea shipping where they show considerable superiority over competitive designs in attributes such as power requirements, economy, space availability and seakeeping. The rapid growth of the market has led to the need for an expanded range of catamaran designs in terms of size, speed, and payload diversity (passengers, vehicles, containers). However, even now, there is a scarcity of publicly available preliminary design tools for catamarans. This fact hinders the ship owner and naval architect from being able to quickly assess the relative merits of alternative potential designs without having to resort to expensive expert consultancy solutions. Resistance characteristics and power requirements are principal aspects of the catamaran design spiral as they are strongly coupled with speed and fuel economy, and, consequently, the operating and cost efficiencies of the vessel. This thesis aims towards the development of a tool that predicts the resistance and required power for catamaran vessels in the range of 20m to 80m. Vessels with both round bilge and hard chine hulls are considered.
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