The British company BMT has announced the launch of an unmanned boat in an innovative ‘Pentamaran’ platform. The developers believe that such a platform will create a high-speed, almost all-weather, and economical device that can perform a variety of tasks at sea.
These innovative vessels offer a myriad of applications for defense and commercial innovators. It can also be custom configured for military, patrol, intelligence surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR), anti-submarine warfare (ASW), and hydrographic survey work.
The Pentamaran is a vessel with five parallel hulls connected in the upper part. This allows a significant drag reduction compared to conventional hull forms such as mono-hulls, catamarans, and trimaran. The main advantage of the circuit is its high stability and seaworthiness, as well as low resistance to movement at high speeds. Thanks to this, the Pentamaran is also expected to have significantly lower fuel consumption than other units.
The BMT has a very slim, narrow main hull and two side hulls, also called sponsons. The latter is composed of two hulls arranged one after the other. When the vessel is operating on flat water, the forward sponsons are not submerged, as they provide roll stability effect in waves only.
The BMT announced that they were considering several schemes for a promising robot, including a single-hull, catamaran, and trimaran. During the simulation, the trimaran showed the best result from the point of view of hydrodynamic resistance to movement, but its stability during strong sea waves was rather low.
It can be used to perform various tasks at sea, including patrolling, reconnaissance and surveillance, anti-submarine warfare, hydrographic surveys, and search and rescue operations. Other details of this promising vessel have not yet been disclosed.
