An Improved Body-Exact Method to Predict the Maneuvering of Ships in a Seaway

Abstract

Abstract Over the last decade, the importance of considering the effects of waves on the maneuvering characteristics of ships has been widely recognized. This paper presents the application of a recently developed nonlinear body-exact scheme (Subramanian, Rakesh, and Beck (2018)) to directly simulate the maneuvering characteristics of a container ship in calm water and in regular waves. In the present body-exact scheme, the perturbation free surface boundary conditions are transferred to a representative incident wave surface at each station at each time. The hydrodynamic forces are computed on the exact instantaneous wetted surface formed by the intersection of the incident wave surface with the exact body position at each time. It is proposed that this model will not only improve first order sea loads but also the higher order drift force predictions which are critical for determining the trajectory of a maneuvering vessel in a seaway. The strip theory formulation has been found to be numerically stable, robust and computationally efficient, which are all critical aspects when performing long time maneuvering simulations. The hull maneuvering, rudder and propeller forces are adopted from standard systems-based approaches that are used to predict calm water maneuvers. Care is taken to ensure that ideal fluid effects are separated from viscous effects and not double counted. Results are presented for turning circle maneuvers in calm water and regular waves incident at various headings and wavelengths. The numerical results are compared with available experiments.