New Book Updates Ship Stability Knowledge
A new book Contemporary Ideas on Ship Stability: Risk of Capsizing updates industry and U.S. Navy knowledge from the last nine years.
Dr. Vadim Belenky, a naval architect in the U.S. Simulations and Analysis Branch at Naval Surface Warfare Center, Carderock Division, is editor in chief for the book, the chapters of which are papers from engineers, naval architects and academics from around the world.
Belenky said that while the research in the book, much of it experimental in nature, was not published in peer-reviewed journals, it deserved to be preserved in the form of this book, which seeks to highlight contemporary research that results in products like TEMPEST, a dynamic stability prediction tool developed by Naval Sea Systems Command (NAVSEA).
Carderock’s Dr. Art Reed was a co-author on the first chapter of the book, “TEMPEST—A New Computationally Efficient Dynamic Stability Prediction Tool.” His co-author was Bill Belknap, a former Carderock employee and now a technical warrant holder at Naval Sea Systems Command (NAVSEA). The abstract for chapter one says, “TEMPEST is designed to be computationally efficient to support real-time training simulators, as well as high-resolution evaluation of surface-ship, dynamic-stability performance across a wide range of possible environmental conditions. TEMPEST aims to improve the state of the art for real-time computations through the inclusion of nonlinear (body-exact) hydrodynamic perturbation forces and physics-based, viscosity-influenced lift and cross-flow drag forces.”
Reed, the Navy’s senior research scientist and technical consultant for high-speed ship hydrodynamics, said TEMPEST has been very important software in the field of dynamic stability research, and it was a multi-million-dollar investment for the U.S. Navy.
While the book includes research from laboratories and universities worldwide, the Carderock contribution contains the necessary research specific to the U.S. Navy. Dr. Jack Price, Carderock’s director of research, said “We are the only Navy entity that has this understanding and they (the Navy) rely upon us, even if they don’t realize they do, to maintain that research capability,” Price said. “Because if we didn’t do it, for the naval applications that we do, there wouldn’t be anybody in the world that could do that for us—anybody we would trust.”
The research presented in this book has been and is being used in support of several ship design efforts. The statistical methods are being used to provide quantitative metrics as to the bounds of Carderock’s seakeeping experimental results; the statistical-extrapolation methods are being used to develop operator guidance and safe-operating envelopes for use onboard ship; and the more fundamental techniques for assessing stability are being investigated for use to provide dynamic stability assessments during early stage design.
“It serves as a resource that anyone needing to assess ship stability can use to develop their own methodologies. This includes intact stability; damaged stability; stability in waves; the verification, validation and accreditation of assessment tools; etc.,” Reed said. “This is becoming critical with the IMO planning to issue its Second Generation Intact Stability guidance in the next year.”
The book contains material from two International Ship Stability Workshops and one International Conference on Stability of Shops and Ocean Vehicles: the 2010 workshop at Wageningen, Netherlands; the 2011 workshop in Washington, D.C.; and the 2012 conference in Athens, Greece.
The book has four major parts:
Part A: Mathematical model of ship motions in waves (15 chapters)
Part B: Dynamics of large motions (12 chapters)
Part C: Experimental research (11 chapters)
Part D: Requirements, regulation and operation (17 chapters)