THE PROCEDURE FOR CALCULATION OF THE OPTIMAL CARRYING CAPACITY OF PUSHED CONVOY BASED ON PARAMETERS OBTAINED BY EXPERIMENTS IN ACTUAL NAVIGATING CONDITIONS

Sa？etak Exploitation and technical parameters of a ship are very important qualitative characteristics which determine the efficiency of the use of any kind of transportation vessels both for pushboats and for pushed convoys as a whole. Some of the most important exploitation and technical parameters are: parameter of transport efficiency, tonnage quality parameter, and thrust output of propeller. The complexity of these parameters can be seen from the fact that they present the values of achieved payload-distance during transportation of cargo in the unit of time per unit of installed (or effective) power of propelling engines of ships. The most reliable means for determining the transport efficiency is the method of testing in actual navigating conditions, which is conducted in order to determine exact technical characteristics of propelling engines of pushboats, and to determine drawbacks in their work and to increase their thrust and speed characteristics. This paper will present the process of choosing the size, shape, and number of barges in the convoy based on experiments conducted on a pushboat whose propelling engines have installed power 3×809.6 kW (3×1,100 HP). Obtained results are based on presumption that the total resistance of a pushed convoy is equal to the total thrust achieved by the ship’s propelling complex