ON THE STABILITY OF FAST FERRY IN DAMAGE SCENARIOS

Abstract

The ro-ro ships are characterized by a large garage compartment extending from stern to bow. Damage conditions, heavy weather and large floodable spaces could create serious accidents, with the loss of life and goods at sea, both for conventional ferries and fast ferries. The occurred accidents showed the need of a more accurate approach to the damaged ship stability in waves, also in head sea and following sea conditions, because of the great movements of water on the car deck. With this aim a tool for analysing the ship response in wave with damaged compartments has been developed and applied on a typical fast ferry. The ship dynamic is simulated in time domain, including non-linear effects, taking into account critical scenarios on the damaged ship. The applications regard ship grounding, assuming head sea, modelled by regular wave. In addition to that, also the particularly critical condition of a transversal wind heeling moment has been applied to compute non symmetrical behaviour. Moreover the stability problems arising from the presence of trapped water in the garage compartment are investigated assuming the same environmental scenarios.