Re: [PSUBS-MAILIST] Going faster (was: gel-coat)

[Carl Kem <dustyut@lasal.net>]

Hey, that's a new twist if I've ever seen one!  "Honey I'm gonna go buy a
mink coat for my sub, back in a bit...."
LOL!
Carl


"Michael B. Holt" wrote:

> Thanks, Tim, for the essay about grooves in the hull.  Somewhere
> around here I have papers about that sort of thing, and there was a
> patent granted for the idea of a grooved hull.
>
> One of the papers is about the shark and dolphin skin characteristics.
> What I gleaned from the article was that dolphin skin, especially,
> reduced drag by being flexible.  As I recall the paper, bubbles formed
> on the skin, and the dolphin would eject them by sending a wave of
> warm blood along its body while flexing the entire skin in a series
> of pulses.  The bubbles served the same function as the sandpaper, but
> only up to a certain speed; beyond that, they were drag-inducers.
>
> Of course, figuring out how to send a series of waves long the
> out hull of a submarine might be an engineering challenge ...
>
> Shark skin is different, being covered with a layer of fibers oriented
> along the flow direction.  That might work, for some speeds, but the
> idea of a submarine covered in plastic fur is, at least, funny as hell.
>
> Has anyone evdr followed up the idea of the flipper as propulsion?
> There's a canoe builder in Canada who has a pedal-pwoered boat that
> uses a flexible flipper for propulsion.  I'll see what I can find.
>
> Mike

--
"In times like these, it helps to recall there have always been times like
these."-Paul Harvey