A local university has completed the installation of a world-class test facility for large-scale models of surface ships and submarines, which the university says could be of much help to the navy.
The test facility, called the Large Cavitation Tunnel (LCT), is the third largest of its kind in the world. Completed earlier this year, it sits in the Keelung-based National Taiwan Ocean University (NTOU). It cost nearly NT$400 million to build and took more than three years to complete.
The university made a detailed introduction to the functions and capabilities of the LCT on Wednesday at the Tenth National Conference on Naval Ship Engineering hosted by the Chung-Cheng Institute of Technology of the military.
Dr. Ke Yung-tse (
"Commercial ship designs do not need to be tested in the LCT. Only military ships will need tests in the LCT, since they must not produce much noise while in operation," Ke said.
The LCT tests are aimed at finding out -- using a one-tenth scale model of a surface ship or submarine design -- the noise level which would be produced by the vessel's propeller or the vortex which would be caused by the hull design of the vessel.
"If the navy is not interested in using the university's LCT for the design of a submarine, it could consider applying it to find out the noise levels or other relevant facts about surface ships already in service," Ke said.
"The domestically-built Cheng Kung-class frigate, for instance, has been short of such data since the design phase. It is really necessary for the navy to start building a data bank for the Cheng Kung-class frigate regarding facts such as the noises that the ship produces during operation," he said.
The university's installation of a world-class LCT marks part of the efforts being made by academic institutions to comply with the government's policy of developing a self-reliant defense industry.
Besides NTOU, the National Taiwan University and National Chen Kung University have also built similar but lower-end test facilities, which the navy could use in its ship-building efforts.
But these efforts might not be appreciated by defense contractors, who prefer to buy mature technologies from abroad rather than domestically-developed ones that need to take time to become reliable.
The state-run China Shipbuilding Corp. (CSBC), which has been bidding to participate in the construction of part of the eight diesel-powered submarines that the US has promised to get for Taiwan, does not think the university's LCT will be of any help to its submarine building project.
A spokesman for the CSBC said the company does not want to start from scratch, since it does not have much time.
"We are now trying to import existing submarine designs from abroad so as to be able to get into the business as early as possible," the company spokesman said.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater