Investigation of the Horizontal Drifting Effects on Ships With Forward Speed

This paper is concerned with the horizontal drifting effects on ships moving with forward speed in waves. The ship configurations can be a single or multiple ships operating alongside one another. In close-in position (CIP) ship operations, the position of the ships often needs to be maintained relatively steady by means of Dynamic Positioning (DP) systems that incorporate thrusters or control surfaces. In developing such systems, especially those using wave feed-forward (WFF) control algorithms, the mean or low frequency drift force and moment in the horizontal plane are required to set up the control loop. The present study uses the Large Amplitude Motions Program (LAMP), a time domain, 3-D panel code for the prediction of motions and wave loads for a ship or ships in waves, to calculate the drifting forces in the horizontal plane for ships moving with or without forward speed. Since the drifting effects are second order in association with the incident wave amplitude, the formulation in LAMP has been expanded to account for the additional second order terms. This paper presents the mathematical formulation — including the second order drifting effects, its numerical implementation in LAMP, and the results from several validation cases — for a single body with or without forward speed. The analysis of the horizontal drifting effects on two-ship configurations with or without a DP system will be conducted in a future study.