Assessment of whipping and springing on a large container vessel

Abstract

Wave induced vibrations increase the fatigue and extreme loading, but this is normally neglected in design. The industry view on this is changing. Wave induced vibrations are often divided into springing and whipping, and their relative contribution to fatigue and extreme loading varies depending on ship design. When it comes to displacement vessels, the contribution from whipping on fatigue and extreme loading is particularly high for certain container vessels. A large modern design container vessel with high bow flare angle and high service speed has been considered. The container vessel was equipped with a hull monitoring system from a recognized supplier of HMON systems. The vessel has been operating between Asia and Europe for a few years and valuable data has been collected. Also model tests have been carried out of this vessel to investigate fatigue and extreme loading, but model tests are often limited to head seas. For the full scale measurements, the correlation between stress data and wind data has been investigated. The wave and vibration damage are shown versus heading and Beaufort strength to indicate general trends. The wind data has also been compared to North Atlantic design environment. Even though it has been shown that the encountered wind data has been much less severe than in North Atlantic, the extreme loading defined by IACS URS11 is significantly exceeded when whipping is included. If whipping may contribute to collapse, then proper seamanship may be useful in order to limit the extreme loading. The vibration damage is also observed to be high from head to beam seas, and even present in stern seas, but fatigue damage in general is low on this East Asia to Europe trade.