Fluid Loads and Motions of Damaged Ships

Christian Wood - C.D.Wood@soton.ac.uk - School of Engineering Sciences Sponsored by MoD/Lloyds Register Centre of Excellence for Marine Structures Supervisors Dr. D. Hudson, Dr. M. Tan and Mr. P. James (Lloyds Register)
Background
An area of research that is gathering momentum in the marine industry is that of the effect of damage on ship structures. Research into the behaviour of damaged ships began in the mid nineties as a result of Ro-Ro disasters (e.g. Estonia in 1994). Due to the way the Estonia sank, this early research mainly focused on transient behaviour immediately after the damage takes place, the prediction of capsize, and of large lateral motions.

Component parts
In order to gain confidence in the ability of CFD to predict ship motions and pressure fields for use in a structural solver, the problem is being validated in a number of smaller cases. These cases are Dambreak which is a violent free surface motion problem, Numerical Wave Tank in order to simulate a seaway environment, Compartment Flooding for violent ingress and egress of floodwater and Rigid Body Motions for using calculated hull surface pressures to induce ship motion. Dambreak Pressure data is recorded and measurements compared to experimental data from the right hand wall 0.16m from the floor. Quantitative comparison is found for pressure everywhere but at the peaks due to the coarse mesh and the 1st order time discretisation scheme that was used in the CFD study. Resolution of the pressure peaks is future work.

Further research efforts, headed by the UK MoD, were sparked when HMS Nottingham ran aground tearing a 50m hole from bow to bridge, flooding five compartments and almost causing the ship to sink just off Lord Howe Island in 2002. The figure above shows the stricken HMS Nottingham stuck on rocks (left), Close up of damage once lifted from the water (right) from the BBC news website. A collaboration between MoD, Lloyds Register, UCL and the University of Southampton has been formed to bring together research efforts in this area, the MoD/Lloyds Register Centre of Excellence for Marine Structures. The following is a question posed by the MoD as a brief outline of the direction for this EngD research. For a given amount of underwater damage (e.g. collision or torpedo/mine hit), what will be the progressive damage spread if the ship travels at x knots? OR for a given amount of underwater damage, what is the maximum speed at which the ship can travel without causing additional damage? The aim of this EngD research is to predict the fluid loading on ships with damage, both the global hull girder loads due to additional weight of the floodwater and local loads on the area around the damage location to assess potential damage propagation.

A cos(kx t )
gAk cosh k ( z h) u cos(kx t ) cosh(kh) gAk sinh k ( z h) w sin(kx t ) cosh(kh)
Wave heights are recorded and compared to experimental results for both regular and irregular wave trains. This is to validate CFD capability of creating a section of seaway. Current work includes the superposition of wave components to create freak waves using finite depth first order waves described in the equations (above).
Compartment Flooding

Numerical Wave Tank

Q CD A0 2 gh
Volume flow rate through an orifice is generally calculated using the formula above with a constant discharge co-efficient CD. CFD is currently being used to identify whether this common assumption is valid given different damage sizes, shapes and locations. Rigid Body Motions a b

The damaged ship scenarios

The figure above identifies the main causes of for ship losses and is based on Paik & Thayamballi (1998). It is hoped eventually that all of the ship loss mechanisms identified in the diagram will be covered within the Centre of Excellence research. In this EngD research project the area of primary interest is the water ingress leading to hull girder collapse.
Side Shell Failure Hatch Cover Failure Corrosion Fatigue Crack Local Dent

Water Ingress

Partial Loss of Structure

Hold Flooding Transverse Bulkhead Failure Progressive Flooding to Adjacent Holds Loss of Stability Decrease of Hull Girder Strength

Increase of Hull Girder Loads

Rigid body motions is the final component of the validation exercises. The motions are induced by pressures on the hull and the loading and moments of inertia of the ship. Above diagrams show heave (a) and pitch(b) motions recorded from the simulation of a 5m frigate model geometry in waves with forward speed with a Froude number of 0.28.

Damage Propagation

Conclusions
Ability of RANS modelling to predict damaged ship motions using reasonable computational resources needs to be validated. This is being done by validating abilities to predict the important physics. The component parts require differing levels of grid refinement and modelling approaches, the challenge will be to bring these parts together into a single simulation that gives a stable and accurate solution. There are many different ways in which a ship can be damaged which bring about different flooding behaviour. Many cases will therefore be conducted to build a response surface for these variables. Therefore the simulations will need to be as computationally efficient as possible.

Loss of Reserve Buoyancy

Hull Girder Collapse

Loss of Vessel
The physics involved in the flooding and failure of a damaged ship is strongly nonlinear. Coupling a CFD model with rigid body motions calculations could potentially go some way to naturally include many of these fluid dynamic based non-linear interactions. It is intended through collaboration within the Maritime Centre of Excellence that this pressure data generated by a RANS and rigid body motions coupling will then be used for structural calculations, however this coupling is one way, and ship deformation and damage propagation data will not be fed back into the CFD at this time. The centre of excellence research aims to predict the above modes of failure.

Future work
Using the components a full damaged ship model will be built up. This will be used to provide a benchmark for simplified damaged ship models and for information on cases that lie outside the assumptions made in the simplified cases. Using these a system of response surfaces will be generated to predict immediate concerns for the ship.

FSI Away Day 2010