The Representation of Ship Hulls by Conformal Mapping Functions: Fractional Maps
The method for analytically representing ship hulls by conformal mapping functions of the cross sections and lengthwise polynomial interpolation of the mappings, which was developed by von Kerczek and Tuck [1], has found useful applications to ship hydrodynamics (see references [2] and [3]) as well as ship design [4]. In both such applications, however, there have been two major criticisms of this type of representation of the underwater portion of the ship hull. The first criticism concerned the occurrence of undesirable waviness in the longitudinal direction of the cross sections of the ship. This waviness is due to fitting high-degree polynomials to very slowly varying data. This defect of the surface representation can be removed easily by abandoning the polynomial interpolation and substituting some form of spline interpolation. It has been found that interpolation by simple Hermite cubic splines works very well. Such modifications of the lengthwise interpolation scheme are well known and need no elaboration.