Aplication of Equivalent Systems of Forces on Tugboats

ENSC 11 Bonus Project

By Edzel B. Briones and Marlon Marasigan

Aplication of Equivalent Systems of Forces on Tugboats

Edzel Briones and Marlon Marasigan Ensc 11 Y March 25, 2011
Ships in the modern era compared to the past are getting bigger and heavier. These huge ships can move forward and backwards easily with engines built for heavy terrain, but are usually unable to maneuver sideways. Some ships have transverse bow thrusters which can assist the ship to move sideways, but even these advanced designs only allow limited side to side mobility. Positioning this ships on the docks are extremely difficult without the help of tugboats or also know as tugs.

Tugboats (tug) are a boat that maneuvers vessels by pushing or towing them. They aid the construction work taking place on or near a body of water and usually move vessels that cannot move on their own such as barges, disabled ships, sunken ships, or oil tankers through difficult regions like narrow canals or in a crowded harbour. This is what we call a Tug Assist. In a tug assist, one or two tugboats meet the larger ship while it is still outside the port. A common scenario has one tugboat behind the ship, attached to it by a line. This tugboat acts as a brake to slow down and stop the large ship. Another tugboat can be near the bow of the ship, at the port or starboard side, depending on which side the captain of the assisted ship wants to moor. This second tugboat is attached to the side of the ship by a line, allowing the
Two tugboats behind a huge car carrier passing through Panama Canal

tug to push or pull the boat in the desired direction. Tugboats are also used for 1

towing. They can move a floating object with no power of its own, such as a barge, or a "dead ship," a ship that is not under its own power and is moved from one location to another. A typical towing situation would involve one tugboat with a towing cable attached from the stern of the tug to the barge or dead ship. A tandem tow
Tugboats placing USS John F. Kennedy (CV-67) into port

is when one tugboat is towing two barges in a line. Barges can be used to move almost

anything that a ship can, and the tugboats move them from one place to another. A tugboat's role in a construction project is more varied and complex. Typically, a tug assists in construction by moving small barges carrying the construction equipment from place to place on a construction site. The tugboat can also act as a crew boat so that the construction crew can get around at crew change time. These workhorses of the sea can move vessels hundreds, even thousands, of times their own size. The concept of Summation of Forces that we learned from Engineering Science 11 can be

applied on the process of tug assist. Let us take for example the battleship Jersey maneuvered by USS New being four

tugboats at Bremerton Naval Shipyard shown on the picture. In this example we can 2

sum the forces exerted on the ship by the tugboats on an XY plane and replace it by an equivalent force exerted by a single, more powerful, tugboat. By applying statics and equivalent forces, we can have an example like below taken from the book Vector Mechanics for Engineers by Beer et. al..

Whenever this kind of problem arise, a situation where only a single tugboat that have the same effect as the original tugboats pulling the ship is needed, the concept of Equivalent System of Forces can be applied to solve the problem.

Being the workhorses of the sea, tugboats are essential to the marine industry. These tenacious little boats offer a perfect example of why it is always best not to judge a book by its cover, or in this case, a boat by its size.