Experimental Study on the Six Degree-of-Freedom Motions of a Damaged Ship Floating in Regular Waves

Abstract

One of the most critical issues for ship owners, shipbuilders, and insurance companies is the operational safety. In particular, keeping damaged ships stable in waves is of great interest, because more nonconventional hull forms are being introduced for military and passenger vessels while international rules and regulations are becoming stricter. However, ship stability for damaged ships is quite different from that for intact ships as the assessment is very complicated and difficult due to the highly nonlinear behavior. Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) methods that solve the Navier–Stokes equations are acknowledged as the only viable approach to simulate and analyze these complex physical phenomena. Although there have been a number of research activities reported on damaged ship stability recently, most of them are not designed to validate CFD studies. For a data set to be valuable for CFD validation and development, model tests should eliminate unclear factors as much as possible. The main objective of this study is to establish an experimental database for CFD validation by collecting data from towing tank tests of a ship hull's six degree-of-freedom (6DOF) motion responses in regular waves for both intact and damaged conditions. A mooring system was designed to prevent drift motions of the ship model. Parametric roll was not observed when the ship was damaged, although it was observed for the intact ship in the same wave conditions. The mooring force acting on the ship model due to spring tension was also calculated.