Amount Awarded: $25,000
The motivation is to assist the maritime community in reducing emissions considerably from ships, especially ocean-going vessels, by practical, cost effective methods applicable to both new-builds and existing vessels. This can be achieved by reducing skin friction, which accounts for more than 70% of resistance of most ocean-going vessels. By air lubrication methods the skin friction could be reduced up to 10%. However, studies are limited to fairly low Reynolds numbers, which do not cover the operational profile of ocean-going vessels. Therefore, novel numerical and experimental investigations are required to analyze the drag reduction at high Reynolds numbers. With prior Sather support the PIs co-organized two well attended workshops in November 2023 in Berkeley and May 2024 in Trondheim, and succeeded in bringing together competing air lubrication technology companies and leading academics in the field. These invitation only workshops inspired us to co-organize an open symposium on air lubrication technologies in June 2025. Based on the results of this NTNU-UCB collaboration there is urgent need for follow-up workshops and further research collaboration to keep up the momentum, and to help make a significant global impact by laying a more solid scientific foundation for air lubrication technologies and continuing the effort to bring these advances to the industry in order to make a significant global impact in reducing shipping emissions. In this project advanced computational fluid dynamic methods and novel experimental methods developed in other ongoing projects independently at UCB and NTNU will be further utilized, methods compared and discussed through a 3rd workshop which will take place at Berkeley, and the PI’s will collaborate on experimental study in-person in spring 2026 in Trondheim.