Design, development and commissioning of a new towing tank at the University of Southampton: A decade of endeavour

B Malas (LHEEA)

REVIEW 3 major objections 5 minor 24 references

Design, development and commissioning of a new towing tank at the University of Southampton: A decade of endeavour

T0 review · 3 major / 5 minor · reviewed 2026-08-07 · deepseek-v4-flash

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Pith's one-line read The paper reports that a new 138 m towing tank, completed in 2022 after a decade of delays, is operational and validated: its carriage meets standard resistance-test procedures, and calm-water resistance on a 4 m KCS model matches a 2015…

desk verdict A candid facility commissioning report with a useful new tank and a first-of-kind two-winch carriage; the validation claim needs uncertainty bars and a scale-effect caveat, but the engineering content is solid. read the letter →

arxiv 2506.09057 v1 pith:AQ7EUIHO submitted 2025-06-04 physics.ins-det

B Malas (LHEEA) This is my paper

classification physics.ins-det

keywords towingtankexperimentalhydrodynamicsshipmodelresistancecarriagepropulsioncommissioningvalidationKCSbenchmarkcalmwaterwavemaker

verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal

The pith

A machine-rendered reading of the paper's core claim, the machinery that carries it, and where it could break.

The reading

This paper recounts the design, construction, and commissioning of a mid-sized towing tank, from the initial planning in the early 2010s to final handover in February 2022. Its central claim is that the facility now works: the carriage performance satisfies international towing-tank resistance-test procedures, and calm-water resistance measurements on a 4.0 m container-ship model agree with a 2015 international benchmark workshop scaled to the new model scale, with an average difference of 0.7% and a spread from -0.9% to +1.8%. A sympathetic reader should care because this is the evidence that the tank can produce trustworthy hydrodynamic data for teaching, research, and commercial work, replacing decades of outsourcing to external facilities. The paper also documents the technical choices—cable propulsion, rail alignment, water treatment, wave generation, and damping beaches—and the project-management failures that turned a planned 2016 opening into a 2022 one.

What carries the argument

The central object is a towing tank: a 138 m long, 6 m wide, 3.5 m deep water-filled channel with a carriage that tows ship models along rails at controlled speeds. The mechanism that carries the argument is the carriage's two-winch cable propulsion system: two 315 kW winches pull the carriage through 14 mm synthetic cables, with real-time control (a 1 ms software loop) that compensates for cable stretch and for the changing length of each cable as the carriage moves, so both winches stay synchronized and tension stays balanced. Around this, the paper assembles the supporting hardware—precision-aligned rails, a dynamometer built on interchangeable spring plates, acoustic wave probes, and a 12-paddle wave maker—and validates the whole chain by comparing model resistance against benchmark data.

What would settle it

Repeat the calm-water resistance test on the same 4.0 m KCS model but with the carriage running west-to-east instead of east-to-west, or after a full realignment of the north rail, and check whether the 0.7% average agreement survives; if the deviation grows beyond the reported ±2% band, the validation claim would be weakened. A stronger test would be to run the same model in a second, independently validated tank of similar size and compare the measured resistance at the same scaled speeds.

Watch

Extended reading notes

Core claim

After nearly a decade of construction and commissioning, the towing tank is fully operational and its measurement quality is validated. The carriage, driven by two synchronized winches pulling synthetic cables, reaches 10 m/s east-to-west and 8 m/s west-to-east, with useful measurement time falling exponentially from 45.4 s at 2 m/s to 1.8 s at 10 m/s. Speed accuracy, overshoot, and speed noise are comparable to those of a similar-length tank, and the paper states they are good enough to comply with international resistance-test procedures. The validation run, made in March 2022 on a 4.0 m KCS model (a standard benchmark container-ship hull), gave resistance values whose average deviation from the 2015 benchmark results scaled by the standard friction line is 0.7%, with individual values between -0.9% and +1.8%. The author presents this agreement as proof that the new tank's equipment delivers valid calm-water resistance measurements.

Load-bearing premise

The validation assumes that the benchmark resistance values from the 2015 workshop, scaled from a 7.7 m model at scale 31.6 to a 4.0 m model at scale 61.0 using the standard friction-line correction, remain a valid reference across that change of model scale.

Editorial extensions

If this is right

The tank's calm-water resistance measurements can be used for ship-model testing in teaching, research, and commercial projects, since the KCS validation covers the measurement chain from carriage speed to dynamometer output.
A two-winch, cable-driven carriage with real-time cable-stretch compensation is a workable propulsion design for mid-sized towing tanks, potentially reusable in future facilities.
The rail-alignment data from 2023 give a quantitative baseline: mean vertical deviation of 0.26 mm in the central measuring zone, with larger deviations at the ends from rust, indicating where periodic maintenance should focus.
The commissioning protocol—performance runs followed by a benchmark resistance test on a standard hull—can serve as a template for future towing-tank acceptances.
The environmental monitoring data, showing near-uniform water temperature with an average difference of about 0.2% across locations, support the suitability of the tank for tests that are sensitive to thermal stratification.

Reading between the lines

Editorial extensions of the paper, not claims the author makes directly.

Because the validation rests on one hull form, a stronger commissioning claim would require repeating the exercise on a second independent benchmark hull model and checking whether the reported ±2% band persists.
The unexplained difference between the 10 m/s and 8 m/s maximum speeds in the two directions suggests a geometric or calibration asymmetry in the two winches; a simple measurement of drum circumference and a correction function in the control loop might recover the missing speed or improve accuracy.
The paper's own retrospective lesson—that result-free, hourly-billed contract management caused most delays—implies that the tank's scientific value could have been delivered years earlier with different procurement rules; this is a project-management inference, not a hydrodynamic one.
If the thermal uniformity holds during long experimental campaigns, the tank may be unusually well suited for tests where even small temperature gradients bias results, such as yacht sailing tests; that application is not demonstrated in the validation runs.

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Editorial analysis

A structured set of objections, weighed in public.

Desk editor's note, referee report, and a circularity audit.

Desk Editor's Note

read the letter

First, know this: the paper is an adaptation and translation of a 2024 RINA article, and the preamble says so. The novel scientific content is therefore thin relative to that prior publication. What is genuinely useful is the public engineering documentation of a new 138 m towing tank with a two-winch, two-cable carriage that the author plausibly claims is a first.

The paper does several things well. The project history is candid and concrete: contract failures, the filtration undersizing, the absorption beach design error, and the rail alignment method using a taut Dyneema line and a water-filled trench are described with enough detail to be reproduced. Carriage performance is measured and reported numerically—speed error, overshoot, speed noise, usable run time—and compared with the Centrale Nantes tank, which is a helpful benchmark. The resistance validation against Tokyo 2015 KCS uses an external benchmark and no fitted parameters, which is methodologically cleaner than a self-calibration.

Now the soft spots, in proportion. The validation rests on scaling a 7.7 m model at scale 31.6 to a 4.0 m model at scale 60.95 using the ITTC 1957 friction line. That assumes the residuary resistance coefficient is invariant. At Reynolds numbers of order 10^6, that is not obvious, and the paper presents no uncertainty bars or scale-effect check. The observed +1.8%/-0.9% spread could be scale effects just as easily as tank error. The sentence 'these results validate the equipment' therefore overstates what the data show; 'consistent with the benchmark' would be fair. The carriage section similarly concludes that the performance 'proves sufficient' from a few runs, with speed noise growing to 150 mm/s at 10 m/s. That may be fine for many uses, but the claim should be softened. None of this undermines the central conclusion that the tank is operational and fit for purpose; it just means the proof is not as tight as the wording suggests.

This paper is for people commissioning, planning, or using a similar facility, and for groups who want a citable description of the Boldrewood tank. It is not a research result. Given the explicit prior publication, I would not cite it as a primary source for the validation, but I would cite it for the facility description and the rail alignment technique. I would send it to peer review: it is a substantial, honest commissioning report, and a referee can simply ask for an uncertainty paragraph and a rounded validation claim. That is a minor revision.

Referee Report

3 major / 5 minor

Summary. The paper documents the conception, construction, commissioning, and initial validation of the 138 m towing tank at the University of Southampton's Boldrewood campus. It recounts a decade-long project history, including contractor failures, planning delays, and COVID-19 interruptions, and describes the tank's infrastructure, rail alignment, water treatment, carriage and two-winch propulsion system, wavemaker, wave-damping beaches, measurement equipment, and environmental monitoring. Commissioning results cover carriage speed performance and calm-water resistance experiments using a 4 m Kriso Container Ship (KCS) model, compared against Tokyo 2015 benchmark results scaled to the Boldrewood model scale with the ITTC 1957 friction line. The paper reports an average resistance difference of 0.7% (range -0.9% to +1.8%) and concludes that the tank and its equipment are validated.

Significance. If the validation claims hold, this is a useful facilities paper for the experimental naval architecture community. Its strengths are the detailed technical description of a major new tank, the use of an external benchmark (Tokyo 2015) rather than a fitted curve, measured carriage performance data, and multi-year environmental monitoring showing negligible thermal stratification. The lessons learned about procurement, contractor management, and commissioning delays are transferable and candidly presented. The main limitation is that the central validation claim rests on a comparison whose uncertainty and scaling assumptions are not quantified, so the paper's value as a reference for future users depends on strengthening that analysis.

major comments (3)

[§IV-3] The resistance validation conclusion is stronger than the evidence supports. The comparison scales Tokyo 2015 KCS results from a 7.7 m model (scale 31.6) to the new 4.0 m model (scale 60.95) using the ITTC 1957 friction line, with no discussion of form factor variation, residuary resistance scale effects, roughness allowance, turbulence stimulation, or water temperature. At the smaller model Reynolds numbers are roughly half those of the Tokyo model, and scale effects in this regime are known to be non-negligible. The reported 0.7% mean difference and -0.9% to +1.8% range therefore cannot be interpreted as purely tank measurement error. Please provide an uncertainty budget for both the Boldrewood measurements and the scaled benchmark, or explicitly temper the statement that these results validate the tank.
[§IV-2] The claim that the carriage performance "prouve[s] que les performances du chariot ... sont bonnes et suffisantes pour réaliser des essais en respectant les procédures de l'ITTC" is not substantiated by the data presented. The paper reports a speed offset of 12-13 mm/s, speed noise of 25-50 mm/s (up to 150 mm/s at 10 m/s), and an overshoot/stabilization period of about 2 s, but it does not state the ITTC tolerance criteria against which these values are judged, nor does it provide an uncertainty analysis for speed accuracy. At low speeds the absolute offset could be a significant fraction of the target speed; please compare the measured performance explicitly with ITTC 7.5-02-02-01 requirements or revise the conclusion to reflect the observed performance rather than an unquantified claim of sufficiency.
[§IV-3] The scaling procedure itself is described only by the phrase "en utilisant la méthode ITTC 1957." This is insufficient for a validation claim. Please state the exact equations (e.g., the ITTC 1957 friction line and the assumed equality of residuary resistance coefficients), the model dimensions, the wetted surface area, water temperature and density, and the treatment of any roughness or blockage corrections. Without this information a reader cannot reproduce the scaled benchmark or assess whether the agreement is meaningful.

minor comments (5)

[Abstract] The abstract contains a typographical error: "is worldly renowned" should be "is world-renowned." The English abstract would also benefit from a light edit for article usage and phrasing.
[§V] The sentence giving revenue shares lists percentages of 28%, 44%, and 33%, which sum to 105%. Please correct the values or clarify what the percentages refer to.
[§III-3] The phrase "à priori" should be "a priori" (or "apparently" in the English version), and the claim that this is the first two-winch cable carriage is stated without a reference or supporting survey. If this is an important novelty claim, please provide a verifiable source or soften the assertion.
[References] Several references are internal reports ([10], [20], [21]) that may not be publicly accessible. Please state their availability (e.g., repository links, contact author) so that readers can consult the underlying measurement data.
[Figures] Figure 4 shows rail alignment deviations but the caption does not explain the meaning of the averaged curve or the vertical scale; please expand the caption to define what is plotted and the tolerance band.

Circularity Check

0 steps flagged · score 0.0 of 10

No significant circularity: the tank validation is anchored to the external Tokyo 2015 KCS benchmark, and the author's self-citations are descriptive rather than load-bearing.

full rationale

The paper's central validation claim is the calm-water resistance comparison in Section IV-3. The measured KCS resistance data from the Boldrewood tank are compared with Tokyo 2015 workshop benchmark results, which are an external dataset (reference [23]), scaled from model scale 31.6 to 60.95 using the ITTC 1957 friction line. No parameter is fitted to the Boldrewood measurements, and the 0.7% mean difference is not constructed from the measured data themselves; it is a comparison against an independent reference. The paper explicitly acknowledges that the comparison is imperfect because of the model and scale differences ('Si la comparaison n'est pas parfaite à cause de la différence de maquette et d'échelle'), which is an honest limitation affecting the strength of the validation, not a circular step. The carriage performance claims in Section IV-2 are supported by in-paper data (Figure 10) and by reference [20], a same-author commissioning report; that self-citation is descriptive and the measured speed traces are presented in the paper, so the claim does not reduce to the citation. The rail alignment check (reference [10]) and the Centrale Nantes comparison (reference [21]) are likewise descriptive self-citations of routine facility reports, not load-bearing arguments for the main result. The note that the article is adapted from reference [1] is a provenance statement and does not smuggle in any result. The 'first two-winch carriage' claim is unverified but is not used circularly anywhere in the derivation chain. Concerns about the validity of ITTC 1957 scaling across the model-scale change are scientific assumptions with external content; they affect uncertainty but do not make the paper's reasoning circular. Overall, the paper is self-contained against external benchmarks and its central conclusions do not reduce by definition to its inputs.

Assumptions & free parameters 0 free parameters · 4 assumptions · 0 invented entities

No free parameters or invented entities. The central validation relies on external benchmark data and the ITTC 1957 scaling method, both assumed valid. The auxiliary assumptions concern engineering tolerances and environmental uniformity, none of which are independently quantified in the paper.

assumptions (4)

domain assumption ITTC 1957 method is valid for scaling resistance between model scales.
Section IV-3 scales Tokyo 2015 results from a 7.7 m model to a 4.0 m model via ITTC 1957; if this scaling is inaccurate across these scales, the 0.7% agreement does not validate the tank.
domain assumption Tokyo 2015 KCS benchmark data are an accurate external reference.
The paper compares its KCS resistance measurements to benchmark data from reference [23]; the validity of the benchmark is assumed without independent verification.
domain assumption The rail alignment achieved is sufficient for measurement quality.
Section III-1 reports a mean vertical deviation of 0.26 mm in the central part, but does not quantify how residual misalignment affects carriage speed accuracy or model resistance measurements.
domain assumption Water temperature uniformity implies good experimental conditions.
Section III-6 infers absence of stratification and excellent conditions from 0.2% average temperature differences, but no direct measurements of water currents or thermal layers are presented.

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Cite this review

Pith. "Pith review of Design, development and commissioning of a new towing tank at the University of Southampton: A decade of endeavour." pith.science (2026). https://pith.science/paper/AQ7EUIHO

@misc{pith2026250609057,
  author       = {Pith},
  title        = {Pith review of: Design, development and commissioning of a new towing tank at the University of Southampton: A decade of endeavour},
  year         = {2026},
  howpublished = {\url{https://pith.science/paper/AQ7EUIHO}},
  note         = {Machine review of arXiv:2506.09057}
}

read the original abstract

The University of Southampton in the United Kingdom is worldly renowned in the naval architecture domain. For several decades, the researchers in hydrodynamics have been discussing the need of a middle-sized towing tank to accommodate the teaching, research and commercial experiments that previously had to be outsourced. In the early 2010s, the renovation of the Boldrewood campus was decided and opened the way for the construction of this 138 m long, 6 m wide and 3.5 m deep facility. Commissioned in 2022, the tank is equipped with a 12 independent paddles wavemaker and an innovative carriage capable of speeds of up to 10 m/s. The design, construction and commissioning of the experimental facility were subject to many hurdles and delays that are described here. Details about the technical solutions and chosen equipment are provided. Validation experiments are also described.

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Reference graph

Works this paper leans on

24 extracted references · 24 canonical work pages

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[2015]

Ces fuites ont été traitées par injection de résine dans le béton pour les endroits les plus touchés

Pendant le remplissage, des fuites par infiltration à travers le béton sont rapidement apparues en bas des parois verticales du bassin, côté sud (seul mur accessible au sous -sol du bâtiment). Ces fuites ont été traitées par injection de résine dans le béton pour les endroits ...

2015

Pith tools

Reviewed August 7, 2026 · model on record in the stance chip above.

[1] [1]

Malas, L

B. Malas, L. Creasey, D. Buckland et S. R. Turnock, Design, development and commissioning of the Boldrewood towing tank – A decade of endeavour, International Journal of Maritime Engineering, 165 (3), A255-A271, 2024

work page 2024

[2] [2]

D. K. Brown, The way of a ship in the midst of the sea: the life and work of William Froude, Periscope Publishing Ltd, 2006

work page 2006

[3] [3]

Deakin, Decades of development - 40 years history of the Wolfson Unit , Ship & Boat International, RINA, 2008

B. Deakin, Decades of development - 40 years history of the Wolfson Unit , Ship & Boat International, RINA, 2008

work page 2008

[4] [4]

A. F. Molland, Resistance experiments on a systematic series of high-speed catamaran forms: variation of length -displacement ratio and breadth -draught ratio, Transactions of The Royal Institution of Naval Architects, Issue 138, pp. 59-71, 1996

work page 1996

[5] [5]

A. F. Molland, P. A. Wilson, D. J. Taunton, S. Chandraprabha et P. A. Ghani, Resistance and wash measurements on a series of high-speed displacement monohull and catamaran forms in shallow wa ter, Transactions of The Royal Institution of Naval Architects Part A: International Journal of Maritime Engineering, Issue 146(2), pp. 19-38, 2004

work page 2004

[6] [6]

A. S. Bahaj, A. F. Molland, J. R. Chaplin et W. M. J. Betten , Power and thrust measurements of marine current turbines under various hydrodynamic flow conditions in a cavitation tunnel and a towing tank, Renewable Energy, Issue 32(3), pp. 407-426, 2007

work page 2007

[7] [7]

R. A. Cartwright, P. A. Wilson, A. F. Molland et D. J. Taunton, A low wash design for a river patrol craft with minimal environmental impact , Transactions of The Royal Institution of Naval Architects Part A: International Journal of Maritime Engineering, Issue 150(A2), pp. 37 -56, 2008

work page 2008

[8] [8]

Du Cane, High-speed small craft, 3rd Edition, Temple Press Books, London, 1964

P. Du Cane, High-speed small craft, 3rd Edition, Temple Press Books, London, 1964

work page 1964