Long-Term Extreme Response and Reliability of a Vessel Rolling in Random Beam Seas

In this paper, the long-term extreme response of a vessel rolling in random beam seas and the associated reliability evaluation are addressed. The long-term response analysis is based on the upcrossing rates of the roll motion under different sea states. Generally, for nonlinear roll motion in random seas, the high-level roll response is sensitive and closely related to the nonlinear effects associated with the restoring and damping terms. Therefore, assessing the corresponding statistics of the random roll motion with low probability levels is difficult and time-consuming. In this work, the Markov theory is introduced in order to tackle this problem. Specifically, for the dead ship condition, the random roll excitation moment is approximated as a filtered white noise process by applying a second-order linear filter and an efficient four-dimensional (4D) path integration (PI) technique is applied in order to calculate the response statistics. Furthermore, the reliability evaluation is based on the well-known Poisson estimate as well as on the upcrossing rate calculated by the 4D PI method. The long-term analysis and reliability evaluation of the nonlinear roll motion in random seas, which consider the variation of the sea states could be a valuable reference for ship stability research.