Hydrodynamics and Resistance

Most people who work with ships know that resistance exists. Fewer can explain where it comes from, how its components behave differently as speed increases, or why a tanker and a destroyer look nothing alike despite both being designed to move through the same water. This course builds that understanding from the ground up. You'll start with the physical forces that oppose a ship's motion, move through the dimensionless numbers that make model testing possible, and connect hull geometry to real performance trade-offs. By the time you reach propulsion and seakeeping, you'll have the tools to see how every design decision links back to power.

The course follows the same logical chain a naval architect or ship designer uses: resistance sets the power requirement, hull form controls resistance, the propeller converts shaft power into thrust, and waves complicate everything. Each unit builds on the one before it. You'll work through Froude and Reynolds numbers not as abstract math, but as the answer to a concrete problem: how do you predict what a full-scale ship will do from a model you can test in a tank? You'll see why those two numbers create a dilemma that the ITTC method was designed to resolve, and why cavitation sets hard limits on how aggressively a naval propeller can be designed.

This is a technically rigorous course aimed at engineering students, naval officers, and defense professionals who need more than a surface-level familiarity with ship hydrodynamics. You should expect quantitative reasoning, dimensionless analysis, and design trade-offs rather than purely qualitative descriptions. The goal is not to turn you into a hydrodynamicist, but to give you a working mental model of how resistance, propulsion, and seakeeping interact — so that when you read a powering estimate, specify a ship requirement, or evaluate a hull design, you know what the numbers actually mean.