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Air belt.

2K views 7 replies 5 participants last post by  sparkie2182 
#1 · (Edited)
I have posted this enquiry before and got very little response but, as there are possibly more people have joined SN since then there just may be someone remembers this experiment, (apart from me!!).

I can't recall whether it was "Atlantic Causeway" or "Conveyor" was the ship involved, nor does it really matter!

Some retired R.A.F. boffin came-up with the following idea and, unfortunately, I left "The Merch" before the experiment had been run any great length of time so never knew if this blokes idea WAS of any commercial use.

He postulated that if air-bubbles were pumped round the hull of a ship it would greatly reduce the friction between hull and sea by allowing the ship to "slide" through this mass of bubbles.

He had put-up a huge amount of money himself to "back" the idea and Cunard agreed to let him try his idea out on one of the two ACL ships they owned.

A big f**k-off Howden screw air-compressor was mounted in the fo'csle, which pumped air into a massive, perforated canvas-belt runnig from port to starboard under the ship, (just abaft the bow-thruster), which had been rivetted to the hull.

Once the ship had dropped the pilot and before the stand-by turbo-alternator had been shut-down (Remember them? 12,500 r.p.m.! Who COULD forget?), the Howden was fired-up, both ammeters on the turbo's would go "full-scale", sphincters would be twitching until they'd "dropped-back" (the AMMETERS!!!!!), and, once the Howden was pumping air into the belt the stand-by alternator would be shut-down and, apart from a low "moaning" from the Howden you never knew it was there.

Does anyone remember this and, if they do, do they know if the air-belt "technology" DID make any difference to oil-consumption or was it still around 65 tons per watch? Salaams, Phil(Hippy)
 
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#2 ·
How about this Phil,

For three days in September, an ordinary-looking cargo ship traveled up and down Norway's Oslo Fjord. Few casual observers would have guessed that the 272-foot (83-meter) -long vessel was gliding on a carpet of air.

Air pumped about 25 feet (less than 10 meters) below the waterline into subsurface cavities—broad, shallow recesses built into the underside of the ship's hull—creates buoyant pockets that help reduce drag, allowing the craft to slip more easily through the sea surface, according to Jørn Winkler, founder of DK Group, the small Rotterdam marine-engineering firm that developed the new system. Because less energy is required to propel the ship, less oil needs to be burned and emissions can be cut by as much as 15 percent, he says.

John.
 
#4 · (Edited)
Getting there!

John (Satanic mechanic) sent me some info about a Mitsubishi variation on the idea and very intersting too!

The Japanes have refined it big-time and have got some very impressive results. The somewhat crude air-belt, (on "Causeway"), probably didn't work too well as I feel the air-bubbles, rather than "clinging" to the hull, as in the Japanese system, would be swept away by the bow-waves and thus have little to no effect.

Quite possibly the ex-R.A.F. bloke, who funded the idea, would have lost a tremendous amount of money, which would have been an awful shame as, looking at the Japanes results, the idea really does work.

However the life of the inventor was never an easy one and he wouldn't have been the first person to have been ruined by his invention. Salaam, Phil(Hippy)
 
#5 ·
John (Satanic mechanic) sent me some info about a Mitsubishi variation on the idea and very intersting too!

The Japanes have refined it big-time and have got some very impressive results. The somewhat crude air-belt, (on "Causeway"), probably didn't work too well as I feel the air-bubbles, rather than "clinging" to the hull, as in the Japanese system, would be swept away by the bow-waves and thus have little to no effect.

Quite possibly the ex-R.A.F. bloke, who funded the idea, would have lost a tremendous amount of money, which would have been an awful shame as, looking at the Japanes results, the idea really does work.

However the life of the inventor was never an easy one and he wouldn't have been the first person to have been ruined by his invention. Salaam, Phil(Hippy)


Would be nice if he had a friendly lawyer maybe he could make a claim.

John.
 
#6 ·
When living and working in Stavanger 1984-85 the owner of the house we lived in had a brother who had a boat in a fjord upstream from Olso and in May they had to use a bubble jet arrangement to free the boat from the ice, in contrast to Stavanger where it was almost ice free. The diff. was the colder water temp. conditions further inland. I have in fact heard of your mentioned process, is it not used on ice breakers extensively?
 
#7 ·
The Dim Distant Past...

I remember the 'Air Belt' experiment, but was not on board when the kit was installed.. and not sure which ship it was either, but recall that the 'ball bearing' effect of the bubbles did effectively reduce the hull drag, and did effectively reduce the main engine fuel consumption, but that the extra fuel required to run the compressor exceeded that saved from the main engines, and that after 1 trip it was quietly removed.. Most probably would have been in '73, and as a guess it was probably the Causeway...

I think that the idea had derived from a similar arrangement for quietening warship noise for ASW use, and that for the military, the extra fuel required wasn't the big issue...

Cheers! Marcus
 
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