ALGORITHM FOR ESTIMATING THE PARAMETRIC ROLL MOTIONS

Abstract

For a ship, both synchronous and parametric roll motions can be modelled by nonlinear second-order differential equations with the roll angle as dependent variable and the nonlinearities coming from the damping and restoring moments. In the absence of exact solution techniques, approximate solutions for such equations can be obtained, in principle, analytically or numerically. In this paper, we focused on a fast and accurate recursive scheme based on the segmentation of the time domain into a fine grid of intervals of equal lengths. Due to the smallness of each time subinterval, a reset of the terms of the initial nonlinear equation of motion allows replacing it with a linear one in which the constant coefficients represent approximate values of the former variable coefficients in the middle of each subinterval. The linear equation is solved via the Laplace transform and the resulting solution together with its first derivatives is used to generate the iterative algorithm. This technique was applied to the case of two typical roll equations. The first describes the synchronous roll of a vehicle ferry model equipped or not with bilge keels while the second estimates the parametric roll of a container ship model. In both cases, the analyzed recursive algorithm not only generated results in full agreement with those provided by the ode45 solver in Matlab but also lead to a gain in computation time and offered more flexibility in imposing some restrictive conditions associated, for example, with exceeding some oscillation amplitudes or to the ship capsizing. Key words: synchronous and parametric ship rolling, iterative scheme