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Hydrophobic hulls | |||||||||||||||||
Oil and water don’t mix. There is a molecular repulsion between the two and many substances have this effect. One of the difficulties determining the velocity of a boat or other water vehicle is that water wets a boat hull and this clinging effect puts a severe drag on a boat. I wonder if it is possible to coat a boat hull with a hydrophobic substance so that water would not wet the hull and therefore the drag caused by this wetting would be eliminated. This might give high-speed water vehicles such as those that lift with velocity and skim the surface an extra boost in speed. In effect it would act like a molecular maglev force without the necessity for all the expensive technology of normal maglev. If this works it might even be economic to establish high speed canals over land areas for specialized vehicles.
sand, Nov 12 2008
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They do put hydrophobic coatings on boats. Wax is used on surfboards and other small craft. Wax is very hydrophobic, it's like a really thick oil. Most boat hulls are painted with synthetic paints which are made from petroleum. The paints are hydrophobic and are sometimes waxed to boot. Fiberglass boats use a plastic matrix (usually thermoset polyester) which is also hydrophobic.
An extreme case would be the supercavitation torpedoes like the Russian Shkval, which use rocket-exhaust as the hydrophobic substance to go hundreds of kph underwater.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supercavitation
But I expect you're meaning something a little more mundane and usable.
this material claims to reduce water drag by 20 percent. Wow.
http://gizmodo.com/5098011/nanotech-material-never-gets-wet-even-when-wet
Cool, but I think the 20% reduction is comparing it to regular fabric. It may not be better than a smooth hull.
Almost perfectly hydrophobic surfaces... http://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/post.cfm?id=artificial-arthropod-hair-makes-for-2010-02-26