Investigation of motions of catamarans in regular waves .1.

In this paper an analytical technique based on the two-dimensional Green function method associated with a cross-flow approach for taking viscous effects into account to estimate the motion response of catamarans in the frequency domain is presented. In order to validate this method, the numerical results are compared with experimental values obtained for two different catamarans (ASR5061 [Wahab, R., Pritchett, C. and Ruth, L.C. 1971. On the behaviour of the ASR catamaran in waves. Marine Technology, 8, 334-360] and Marintek [Faltinsen, O., Hoff, J.R., Kvalsvold, J. and Zhao, R. 1992. Global loads on high speed catamarans. 5th Int. Symp. on Practical Design of Ships and Mobile Units, University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, 1.360-1.373]). In the second part of the paper the tests carried out with a third catamaran configuration at the Hydrodynamics Laboratory of the University of Glasgow are presented to evaluate the non-linear effects. These test results cover different speeds and wave heights at a wide range of wave frequencies. The paper concludes that the two-dimensional method correlates very well with measurements of small amplitude motions. For large amplitude motion tests, the non-linear effects become significant when the model speed and wave amplitudes increase. The peak values of heave and pitch motions measured around the resonance frequency are smaller than those obtained from the linear theory.