Establishing a fully empirical ship manoeuvring model

Abstract

Manoeuvrability is an important hydrodynamic performance of a ship. As such, simulations of ship manoeuvring performance are of high engineering value for smart ship operations. These simulations are a good way to determine a ship’s manoeuvring ability through model tests during the initial design phase. This report scrutinises current hydrodynamic force analysis techniques such as captive model tests, free-running tests, open water tests and the numerical methods such as Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD). Experiment data of second order wave forces and moment of similar ship models obtained from past studies, mathematical models from the Marine Ship Simulator (MSS), and empirical formulation derived by researchers – these three different types of manoeuvring models will be compared by incorporating the dimensionless hydrodynamic derivatives of each of these models. By comparing these models, the precision and accuracy of a fully empirical model can be determined.