A Fast Algorithm for the Prediction of Ship-Bank Interaction in Shallow Water

The hydrodynamic interaction induced by the complex flow around a ship maneuvering in restricted waters has a significant influence on navigation safety. In particular, when a ship moves in the vicinity of a bank, the hydrodynamic interaction forces caused by the bank effect can significantly affect the ship’s maneuverability. An efficient algorithm integrated in onboard systems or simulators for capturing the bank effect with fair accuracy would benefit navigation safety. In this study, an algorithm based on the potential-flow theory is presented for efficient calculation of ship-bank hydrodynamic interaction forces. Under the low Froude number assumption, the free surface boundary condition is approximated using the double-body model. A layer of sources is dynamically distributed on part of the seabed and bank in the vicinity of the ship to model the boundary conditions. The sinkage and trim are iteratively solved via hydrostatic balance, and the importance of including sinkage and trim is investigated. To validate the numerical method, a series of simulations with various configurations are carried out, and the results are compared with experiment and numerical results obtained with RANSE-based and Rankine source methods. The comparison and analysis show the accuracy of the method proposed in this paper satisfactory except for extreme shallow water cases.