PREDICTION OF SHIP RESPONSE STATISTICS IN SEVERE SEA CONDITIONS USING RANS

The International Association of Classification Societies (IACS) promotes the paradigm shift in structural design rules for ships towards risk based approaches. This requires improvements in the assessment of structural design loads and new methods for estimation of wave loads and responses, amongst others with respect to extreme value distributions. In this paper we present a numerical method based on the solution of RANS equations to deal with large wave-induced ship motions and corresponding loads for different ship types. Nonlinearities of wave excitation and ship response are included. Short-term ship response distributions from time domain simulations are compared with model test data. Significant deviations from Rayleigh distribution of amplitudes are observed, especially for hull girder loads including effects of structural elasticity.